Give back to society

At Exploring Iceland we are proud to give back to society. Part of this is the support for university students from all over the world that base their studies on Iceland´s economy, wildlife and social structures. We are happy to introduce them to you:  

Hello, my name is Giulia König, I am 21 years old and I study at the Eberhardt Karls University in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. I will become a teacher for geography and politics in the future.

I was on an excursion to Iceland with a group of 20 people in summer 2019. We traveled through the country for three weeks, the company Exploring Iceland had organized and planned our trip at that time. It was a great experience and well planned. We learned a lot about the country.
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Each student was responsible for a topic area, from geology, volcanism and glaciology to tourism.
That's how I got to interview Steinunn Guðbjörnsdóttir , the owner of Exploring Iceland, about tourism in Iceland. We met in front of the City Hall in Reykjavik and she told us interesting facts about the tourism industry in Iceland and its development. It was a very enlightening conversation and we were able to ask her lots of questions.

More than a year later, in autumn 2020, I had to think back to that interview and came up with the idea to write my bachelor thesis in geography about that topic.  I am very interested in tourism in Iceland and my thesis should have a current reference and include the consequences of the Corona crisis. How dependent is Iceland on tourism? What contribution does it make to the economy?

So, I asked for another interview with Meike Witt from Exploring Iceland to get information about how Iceland and the company experienced the past development of tourism and how they are affected by the crisis. ​The interview helped me a lot and so I got exclusive insights into Iceland´s tourism industry  and from people who are directly concerned with the topic. I am connecting it with information from Statistics Iceland and the Icelandic Tourism Board, which have all the statistical figures on their websites.

Text and photos:  Giulia König 

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