After a long break, I am back to blogging on a regular basis with this post. I took a sabbatical on email during the Holidays tried to limit my responses and answering emails, I will give myself a 0.4 on a 1.0 scale i.e I was 40% effective. I wanted to write about the explosion in tourism, travel and hospitality in Iceland and how that is giving rise to a number of startups. I spectacularly “tried” to predict in 2011 that tourism in Iceland would go down… wait for it… in a Tourism Conference. Yep, thats right but the number of tourist coming to Iceland has not only been increasing it is actually increasing at an exponential rate. My former employer Islandsbanki has a research report that comes out everyday and they wrote about Tourism a couple of days back and according to their report, the year-over-year increase in the number of tourist visiting Iceland has increase 21%. I have written about our investments in the Hospitality industry, we are starting to see a lot of activity in that sector in Iceland and we are looking to invest in a couple of startups in this space.  For those data nerds, here is the data that sourced from Statice.is it is an excellent source and they are quite up-to-date. This is overnight stays in Iceland from the year 1997 to 2013, note that 2013 has only 11 months data. What is fascinating to me is change in rate of growth from different countries, the maximum change has been from the US, UK and China in the last 5 years, however the winner is Spain if one considers growth from the first observation of overnight stays. Check out the Google Spreadsheet where I have calculated the growth rates between years and also has the raw data.

Source: Islandsbanki Research

Source: Islandsbanki ResearchSource: Islandsbanki Research

source: Islandsbanki Research

source: Islandsbanki Research

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