1

There is a bus: www.straeto.is

2

It is probably the busiest long distance bus route in Iceland and it is a scenic road.

3

Unfortunately straeto have a really useless website.

You try to find out about buses from Reykjavik to Akureyri. It might be nice to know where the buses run, how many buses per day, and what days per week.

But all we have on Straeto is a journery planner.* So we write Reykjavik in the first box and Akureyri in the second box. So it asks us, did I mean Hotel Natura, Reykjavik, or Reykjavik Botanic Gardens? Now if those locations had anything to do with Straeto's long distance bus service to Akureyri, that might be a sensible question, but of course they don't. They are just the foolish consequences of a badly designed search tool. A well informed person would realise that the bus from Reykjavik runs from Mjodd, and put that in the top box, but most people won't know that and won't think to put that in the box.

But even then, all I can get out of it is the time of the next bus to Akureyri after a point in time I chose. Answers to questions like "how many buses a day do you run to Akureyri and what days do they run" are very hard to obtain.

Can't someone knock a bit of sense into Straeto and get them to realise how useless their website information is. I'd do it myself if they had an email address, but they don't.

*There is also something called Timetable planner, for which you need to know the number of the bus you are interested in. But it still doesn't give you a timetable, on the time of one bus after a time you mention.

4

I travelled that route a few years ago in May or early June, a handful of buses/day, the bus wasn't full. It took some 5-6 hours.

5

You no doubt travelled on a Sterna bus. Sterna (a private company) stopped running its off-season service (subsidised under contract to the government) to Akureyri just last month, as Straeto (a municipally owned company) started running on the route.

Unfortunately because Straeto's website is so useless, it is difficult to say what service it is running. There is some information in general on its longer distance routes on the wikipedia page, with a helpful list of route numbers, but it has not been updated to include the Akureyri service yet. Straeto has reduced its service this winter on the Hofn route in comparison to what it was running in the summer, yet there was no information about this change, it just happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C3%A6t%C3%B3_bs

6

Thank you for your help. I had found the Sterna website but not Straeto. Any ideas how we could find out more details about the Straeto buses?

7

See #1: www.straeto.is

It does have a telephone number you can try once you have discovered how unusable the website is.

8

While I agree that the strætó website could be much better, actually there are bus timetables available. Click on Leiðakerfi and then on Leiðabækur and then look for Bus #57. Or just click this link: http://www.straeto.is/media/toflur/57.pdf

You can see there are two daily trips to Akureyri (except for saturdays, there's one per day). They leave Reykjavík 8.58 (1-7) and 17.30 (1-5, 7).
But only the bus on sunday mornings leaves from BSÍ/Umferðarmiðstöðin/the central bus station in Rvk (at 8.48), for every other Strætó to Akureyri you'll have to go Mjódd which is a shopping centre in southeastern Reykjavík and one of the most important bus terminals of Strætó, but only Strætó. One ride down there will cost you ISK 350/one single ticket.

If you stay at the campsite/youth hostel next to Laugardalslaug, take bus #14 to Grandi and exit at BSÍ (it takes 10 minutes). If you stay in the city centre, you might just walk to BSÍ. That's for sunday mornings where the 57 leaves from BSÍ, obviously.

For the other buses that leave from Mjódd:
Depending on where you stay in RVK, take one of bus routes 3, 4, 11, 12, 17 to Mjódd. It takes about 20 minutes from the city centre to reach Mjódd.

You can get tickets to Akureyri in advance, I bought mine at Hlemmur terminal at the eastern end of Laugarvegur.
There are 22 ticket zones between Reykjavík and Akureyri so you need to buy 22 "basic" tickets (one for each zone) and hand them to the driver. All in all it's ISK 7700 p.P. at the moment. (You'll get a long strip of 22 tickets...)

Public transport in Akureyri is free, btw. :)

9

Timetable page: http://www.straeto.is/leidakerfi/leidabaekur
That page has changed from what it used to look like and my old bookmark for it no longer works, and search engines couldn't find it, so they did something.

Good that they are (back) there, less good that they are so hard to find for the non-Icelandic speaker.