How to get Iceland Kronas in Akureyri and Reykjavik?

Hi everyone,

We will be arriving in Akureyri on our Serenade of the Seas transatlantic cruise in August.

I was wondering how to get local money to pay for our private tours. I'm not sure if I can get Kronas before leaving for our cruise.

Question #1- Does the ship offer currency exchange onboard? We are on the Serenade of the Seas.

Question #2- Is there a currency exchange booth at the Akreyri or Reykjavik terminal?

Question #3- Were ATMs widely available?

Question#4- Were Euros accepted at these ports?

Thanks for any help you may provide.

Twee

Iceland is a very tech savy and "wired" country. ATMs abound. We had some Icelandic currency from a prior trip, but in Akureyri in 2016, which was our first port of call, we pulled money out of one of our accounts at an ATM at a bank in the downtown area, very close to the cruise port. It seems to me that the cruise terminal in Reykjavik has an ATM but we haven't used it. We generally use a credit card which has no foreign transaction fees associated with it.

We didn't have any local currency in Iceland, paid everything with CC.

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Thank you everyone for your information. I will have the tour guide stop by an ATM for us to pull out some money if they require local money.

Twee

We've needed local money once in 4 trips covering nearly 30 days. Everyone takes Credit and Debit cards, especially tour guides.

ATMs are all over the place, but almost everybody takes credit cards.

As others have said, credit card seems to be the norm in Iceland. We didn’t use cash in any of the ports we visited.

Thank you for your input.

Twee

I got some foreign currency before I left home from Bank of America's foreign exchange webpage. If you have an account, just google Bank of American Foreign Exchange.

We did exchange some Norway currency to USD at the Guest Relations on the Legend. They wouldn't let me change EUs directly to Norway, I had to change them to USD first.

When I took our Australia cruise on HAL, I exchanged the currency after we left the country and had them apply it to my seapass account.

Examine merchandise carefully. I grabbed an Arctic Fox stuffed toy and hurried for the bus, only to learn later it was made in China.

They do have some lovely knitted items.

I'm going to be in Ireland, Iceland and Scotland the end of May and I'll also get my foreign currency from my Bank of America...I'm probably one of the few on here that prefer's not to use foreign ATM's.

Ashland

If you get a credit card with no foreign transaction charges you will find almost everywhere will accept it, plus you will be getting the best rate of exchange. No need to carry so much cash.

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Are you able to tip with a credit card for tours? Or are tips not expected? I'm just not sure how that works in Iceland.

Our private tours all took USD or credit cards. We checked with the drivers and they all took USD as tip...in fact one wanted USD since he was going to be visiting the US and he wanted to avoid converting money! We told them if they wanted tips in Krone we would happily do so since we had stopped at an ATM. We had to work hard to actually spend the Krone we had in cash.

We've tipped both ways. One tour we paid via CC at the end and the guide said we could put a tip in ISK onto the charge. Other times we've handed the guide USD as we exited the tour. All service people in Iceland have access to places where they can change USD or EUR into ISK