Hotels in Reykjavik City Centre

A room on Laugavegur sounds like the obvious choice until the first Friday night, when the street noise runs past midnight and a light sleeper regrets not checking which side of the building faces the road. Downtown Reykjavik, postcode 101, covers Laugavegur, the harbour and the streets around Austurvollur, and the properties inside it differ more in what kind of downtown they put a guest next to than in distance from the centre. This page compares hotels in Reykjavik city centre on rating and review count, and says where parking and weekend noise change the pick.

Choosing a street, not just a postcode

A downtown address does not mean a quiet one. Laugavegur runs bars and late kitchens on both sides for most of its length, and a room above street level on a weekend can mean noise well past midnight regardless of how the listing describes the location. The harbour side sits apart from that strip and keeps a different pace after dark, closer to the working docks than to the bar crowd. Austurvollur, the square by the cathedral and parliament, is central and mostly residential-feeling by comparison, though it still sits inside easy walking reach of Laugavegur.

Parking is the other thing a reader coming from outside a city centre tends to assume is included and finds is not. Downtown Reykjavik runs metered street parking, and few of the hotels in the area have their own free parking to offer, so a rental car adds a daily cost that a suburban stay would not.

Guests choosing between kvosin downtown hotel Reykjavik and a property nearer Laugavegur are really choosing between two different kinds of downtown quiet, the harbour and Austurvollur side against the bar street, and the rating comparisons below reflect properties across both sides rather than one location.

Weighing review count against rating

A reader comparing Reykjavik hotels downtown by star rating alone can miss that a small guesthouse and a large hotel are not really being measured the same way once review counts diverge this much. Center Hotels Plaza carries 5,268 reviews at 8.30/5, the largest sample on this page by a wide margin, which makes its score harder to move with a handful of unusual stays either way. A property with a few hundred fewer reviews and a higher headline rating, such as Hotel Local 101 at 9.00/5 from 3,235 reviews, is still a meaningful comparison, but the gap in sample size is worth noting before treating the two scores as directly equal.

The practical answer to which is the best hotel downtown Reykjavik depends on what a stay needs most, a large property with more room types and a long review history, or a smaller one with a tighter, higher-scoring guest base. Neither answer is wrong, and the ratings above are the same ones a reader would use to weigh either case.

What separates the top of the list

Ranking best hotels in downtown Reykjavik by a single number hides that the top scores here belong to smaller properties, not the largest ones. Reykjavik Residence Apartment Hotel leads on rating at 9.20/5, but its review count, 2,873, sits at the lower end of this comparison, while Center Hotels Plaza has the most reviews of any property on the page without matching that top rating. A traveller weighing an apartment-style stay against a full-service hotel is choosing a different kind of downtown experience as much as a different score.

Any hotel in Reykjavik city centre still puts a guest inside walking distance of Laugavegur, the harbour and Austurvollur, so the choice between the properties above comes down to noise tolerance, parking needs and whether an apartment layout or a hotel front desk matters more for the length of the stay.

Weekday against weekend

A weekday booking and a weekend booking are not quite the same stay in this part of the city. Weekend nights bring more foot traffic and bar noise to Laugavegur specifically, and a reader who only checks a Reykjavik downtown hotel's distance from attractions can still end up above a busy corner on a Saturday. Requesting a room away from the street side, where the property allows it, is the more reliable fix than choosing by neighbourhood alone.

Properties such as the Oddsson downtown hotel Reykjavik area covers sit within the same 101 postcode and carry the same trade-off between being close to the action and being close to the noise that comes with it. None of the ratings compared on this page account for room position within a building, only for the guest experience as a whole, so a specific request at booking still matters.

Reading the review counts

A city center hotel Reykjavik reviews search would turn up all six properties compared above, but the counts behind those scores range from under 3,000 to more than 5,000, and that range is worth reading before trusting a single decimal point of difference between two ratings. The Swan House by Heimaleiga sits at 8.40/5 from 3,206 reviews, close in both rating and sample size to Eric the Red Guesthouse at 8.90/5 from 3,037, which makes the two a fairer direct comparison than either is to Center Hotels Plaza's much larger sample.

Travel advice for Iceland is unrelated to hotel choice but worth checking before booking any stay: the US Department of State country information for Iceland and the UK FCDO travel advice for Iceland cover entry rules that apply regardless of which downtown property is booked.

Common questions

Questions

Is downtown Reykjavik walkable to the main sights? Laugavegur, the harbour and Austurvollur are all within walking distance of each other, and most of the properties compared above sit inside that same small area. Does a downtown hotel include parking? Most do not offer free parking, and downtown Reykjavik runs metered street parking, so a rental car adds a daily cost worth budgeting for separately. Is Laugavegur noisy at night? It carries bars and late kitchens along most of its length, and weekend nights are louder than weekday ones, which matters more for a room on the street side of a building. Which downtown hotel has the most reviews? Center Hotels Plaza has the largest review count on this page, 5,268, though not the highest rating.