Keflavik Airport to Reykjavik Bus: What to Know
The keflavik airport to reykjavik bus runs the 49-kilometre Reykjanesbraut across the lava fields of the Reykjanes peninsula, linking Keflavik International Airport with the BSI bus terminal and central hotels. Coaches carry free Wi-Fi, USB charging, toilets and generous luggage holds, and services are timed to meet every scheduled arrival, including late-night landings. Flugrúta transfers, sometimes listed as Reykjavik airport shuttle services, are the standard alternative to a taxi for reaching the capital.
The airport behind every Keflavik Airport to Reykjavik Bus departure began as an American wartime airstrip. US Army engineers broke ground in 1942 and called it Meeks Field, after a young pilot killed flying from Iceland. The first aircraft used it in 1943.
Before the war the island had no paved international runway; the British had laid out Reykjavík's small airfield in 1940. The Americans transferred the Keflavík field to Icelandic authority in 1946, and it became Keflavíkurflugvöllur. The Leifur Eiríksson Air Terminal, still the passenger building, opened in 1987.
Between that terminal and the capital runs Route 41, the Reykjanesbraut, a fifty-kilometre corridor across one of the youngest landscapes in Europe. For decades it was a single carriageway with a grim casualty record; the twinned road was finished in 2008. It crosses the Reykjanes UNESCO Global Geopark, where basalt from the Vogaheiði and Kúagerði flows lies under grey-green woolly fringe moss that needs a century to establish itself. Since December 2023 the Sundhnúkur fissures above Grindavík have reopened repeatedly, staining the southern horizon orange on dark evenings. Strætó's keflavik to reykjavik bus 55 threads the same tarmac at a slower rhythm, calling at Njarðvík, Vogar and Hafnarfjörður.
Kynnisferðir, founded in 1968 and known abroad as Reykjavik Excursions, gave the corridor its scheduled coach service, the flugrúta of Icelandic usage. The Flybus from which modern keflavik airport to reykjavik bus tours descend was built on one principle: the keflavik to reykjavik bus timetable answers to aircraft rather than to clocks, with departures set forty minutes after every flight landing. That is why a keflavik to reykjavik bus time is seldom advertised as a fixed hour. Fleet operations at the terminal are sized instead for peak arrival banks, when a dozen widebodies can disgorge passengers inside a single hour.
The corridor ends at BSÍ Bus Terminal in Vatnsmýri, beside Reykjavík's domestic airport. The initials stand for Bifreiðastöð Íslands, a name Icelanders have used for the country's coach clearing-house since the 1930s. Hallgrímskirkja's basalt-columned tower stands roughly a kilometre to the northeast; the Nauthólsvík geothermal beach lies about the same distance south. Every keflavik airport to reykjavik bus tour finishes on this forecourt, where the hold opens, cases hit wet asphalt, and the capital begins.
2 hr 15 min
