A product built by Centoia

Play Iceland

Guided digital journeys across Iceland. Street View, narration and imagery moving together, so you can travel a route before you ever get in the car — with real planning tools waiting for the moment you decide to go.

What it is: Digital journeys and trip planning tools
Our role: Product, design, build
Status: Live — 9 journeys, 69 stops

A Play Iceland digital journey in progress: a Street View panorama of Reykjavík with narration text below it and the route's stops listed alongside — The Golden Circle journey — narration, panorama and route in sync

The problem

Everything written about travelling in Iceland is either a brochure or a spreadsheet. Operators sell you a tour. Blogs sell you a listicle. Forums give you fragments of somebody else's trip. What almost nothing does is answer the question people actually have first: what is it like out there, and do I want to go?

So people arrive at a plan through accumulation — twelve open tabs, a map they half trust, and a nagging sense they've picked the famous places by default rather than by choice. The information exists. The feeling of the route doesn't.

The decision that shaped it

We could have built another booking platform. We deliberately didn't. Selling tours puts you in a crowded market competing on price and inventory, and it forces every design decision to serve conversion — which is precisely what makes the existing options feel like brochures.

So Play Iceland doesn't sell anything. It makes the journey itself the product, and then earns its keep by being genuinely useful at the moment someone moves from dreaming to planning.

What we built

A digital journey is a route broken into stops. At each one, narration plays while a Street View panorama and still imagery move with it — the words highlight in time with the audio, and the next destination loads automatically if you let it. A map of Iceland tracks where you are on the route, and live weather and local time for the stop sit in the corner, so a journey watched in January still feels attached to a real place on a real day.

9 journeysFrom the Golden Circle to the Eastfjords, Snæfellsnes and Reykjanes.

69 stopsEach one narrated, with panorama and imagery in sync.

8 regionsDestination pages behind every stop, from the Highlands to the Westfjords.

The tools around it

Inspiration is only half the job. The other half is the point where someone stops imagining a trip and starts costing one — so the journeys are wrapped in tools built to answer real questions rather than to look busy.

Trip cost calculator. Route-aware rather than a set of sliders: pick a trip shape and it assumes the mileage that shape implies, then tells you which choice is actually driving the total. Vehicle class and accommodation move the number far more than food does, and the tool says so instead of leaving you to discover it.
Aurora forecast. National probability, KP windows and where the sky is clearest right now — and honest enough to report a flat 0% through the midnight-sun months rather than pretending there's something to chase.
Weather, interactive map, driving distances. The unglamorous layer that decides whether a plan survives contact with an Icelandic forecast.

Every tool routes back into the journeys and destinations. That's the part that's easy to get wrong: a calculator that's a dead end is a gadget, not a product.

Why it's here

Play Iceland is ours, so every call in it was ours to make — including the expensive one to not sell tours. It's the clearest example we have of building for the person using the thing rather than for the transaction at the end of it, which is the same argument we end up making on client work.