Connecting Through Reykjavik: When It Actually Saves Money

Icelandair is the cheapest carrier across the Atlantic in our data — a $0 median premium over the cheapest airline on any route it flies, and outright cheapest on 31 of the 50 routes in the carrier comparison, second only to TAP Air Portugal.

That is a fact about the airline. It is not the same as saying you should connect through Keflavik, which is a question about your specific route. So we priced it that way.

Economy: it wins most of the time, and the losses have a pattern

Every fare below is the same fixed travel week, so the difference between two rows is the airline rather than the dates.

Route	Icelandair via KEF	Cheapest alternative	Nonstop option	Verdict
MCO → FRA	$714	Discover Airlines $1,043	Discover Airlines $1,043	Icelandair by $329
BOS → CDG	$594	SAS $672	Delta $719	Icelandair by $78
ORD → AMS	$655	SAS $699	United $1,291	Icelandair by $44
BOS → LHR	$683	SAS $636	Delta $815	SAS by $47
BOS → FCO	$713	TAP Air Portugal $627	none priced	TAP Air Portugal by $86
ORD → KEF	$727	United $517	United $517	United by $210

Icelandair was cheapest on 31 of the 50 economy routes it flies, second only to TAP. The nineteen it lost are the interesting part, because they are not random.

The airline that beats it most often is SAS through Copenhagen — the same trick through a different northern hub — and our Nordic analysis found the same two carriers behind most of the cheap Nordic fares in the grid. On southern routes it is TAP through Lisbon, which is simply better placed for Italy and Iberia.

The last row is the one nobody expects. United's Chicago–Keflavik nonstop was $517 against Icelandair's own nonstop at $727, and from Orlando United connected through Chicago for $477 against Icelandair's $772. Icelandair holds its own hub comfortably from Boston and New York and loses it outright from the two gateways where United competes. Being the hub carrier is not by itself a price advantage.

So the economy advice is: check Keflavik, but check Copenhagen in the same search — and if you are going to Iceland itself from Chicago or Orlando, check United first.

Business: it is not close

Route	Icelandair via KEF	Cheapest alternative	Nonstop option	Verdict
JFK → LHR	$2,356	Air Serbia $3,057	JetBlue $5,145	Icelandair by $701
JFK → CDG	$2,354	Air Serbia $2,798	JetBlue $5,511	Icelandair by $444
JFK → AMS	$2,404	Air Serbia $2,724	KLM $11,981	Icelandair by $320
JFK → FCO	$3,065	Air Serbia $2,645	Delta $5,752	Air Serbia by $420
ORD → FRA	$3,195	SAS $4,003	Lufthansa $6,070	Icelandair by $808

Four of five, by $320 to $808 against the next cheapest carrier — and the margin against the nonstop flagship is a different order of magnitude entirely.

JFK to Amsterdam: $2,404 through Keflavik against KLM's $11,981 nonstop. Five times the price, same city, same week.

That is the single widest gap in our carrier grid, and it is the number that makes this routing worth understanding. Chicago to Frankfurt is the same shape: $3,195 through Keflavik against Lufthansa's $6,070 on its own hub route.

The one loss is instructive too. On JFK to Rome, Air Serbia through Belgrade came in at $2,645 against Icelandair's $3,065 — a second connecting carrier running the identical playbook through a different hub, and beating it.

What you are actually buying

Here is the part most write-ups of this routing skip.

Icelandair's Saga Premium is not a lie-flat bed. It is a wide recliner with roughly five inches of recline, and it scores 0 out of 10 on the seat dimension of our rubric — the same score, for the same reason, as Azores Airlines.

So the honest framing of that $2,404 is not "business class for a fifth of the price." It is a recliner, in two legs, for a fifth of the price of a bed in one leg. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on whether you sleep sitting up.

Two further things the fare does not show. The crossing becomes two sectors with a connection in the middle, which on a redeye is the part people underestimate. And a missed connection at Keflavik is Icelandair's problem rather than yours only because it is one ticket — book the legs separately to save more and that protection disappears.

Why the routing exists at all

Keflavik sits roughly halfway between the US east coast and mainland Europe, so Icelandair sells two short sectors instead of one long one and fills both directions with connecting traffic.

That is the same structural point our best airlines analysis makes about flag carriers at home: a connecting carrier's alternative to selling you a cheap seat is flying it empty, while a flag carrier defending a prestige nonstop has no such incentive. Which is why forty-four of fifty-one flag-carrier home routes were beaten by another airline in the same week — and why the seven that held are all carriers whose own hub is the destination, on pairs where nobody else connects.

If Iceland is the destination, not the connection

Worth saying, because the grid is unusually positive here: Reykjavik is the second cheapest European city we price, at a $632 median, and the cheapest single fare to it was $422 from New York — nonstop.

That is the only nonstop in this entire piece, and it is cheaper than most of the connections. If you were going to stop in Iceland anyway, the arithmetic is trivially in favor.

We have routed through Keflavik for years, first on WOW Air and now on Icelandair, which is where the interest in this routing comes from. That is routing experience, not a seat review — Icelandair sits on the flown list with the cabin unconfirmed, so nothing here claims firsthand knowledge of Saga Premium, and the 0-out-of-10 above is product data rather than an opinion.

A second US carrier arrives in 2027

Everything above describes a route Icelandair has had largely to itself. That changes.

American Airlines begins Philadelphia to Reykjavik on May 27, 2027 — its first Reykjavik service since 2019, and the only other US carrier we track with a scheduled Iceland route. Tickets went on sale August 31, 2026.

Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions.

A second carrier on a thin route usually pulls the fare down, and Philadelphia is a gateway that needs it: it ranks 14th of 26 on median fare to Europe in our grid, and Reykjavik from Philadelphia currently costs $611 connecting. A nonstop into a market priced above the national floor is exactly the shape where a new route has something to fix, which is the test our new-routes analysis applies to all twenty 2027 launches.

But American is not selling the same product. Its route is a point-to-point nonstop to Iceland, not a connecting bank through it — so it competes for the traveler whose destination is Reykjavik, and not for the one using Keflavik as a bridge to Paris. On the connection itself, Icelandair's position is unchanged.

The honest read is that Philadelphia gets a better Iceland option in 2027 and the rest of this page does not move. We will reprice it when the route actually flies, at which point it stops being an announcement and becomes a fare.

Method

All fares come from the carrier grid: every airline priced for the same fixed travel week of November 8–14, 2026, so the difference between two rows is the airline and not the dates. That is a different dataset from the city grid, which takes the cheapest week per destination and therefore cannot compare carriers at all.

"Cheapest alternative" is the lowest fare from any other carrier on that exact route in that cabin. "Nonstop option" is the lowest nonstop where one was priced; on two routes none was, which is recorded rather than filled in.

Where to go from here

• The best airlines to Europe — all fifteen carriers, and why the cheapest has the worst seat.
• The Nordic discount — the same carrier effect seen from the destination side.
• Azores Airlines business review — the other mid-Atlantic recliner, flown and scored.
• New flights to Europe in 2027 — including a new Philadelphia-Reykjavik nonstop.