Visit Iceland will use World Travel Market to showcase a fresh lineup of wellness retreats alongside new trade packages aimed at sellers of travel.

The national tourism board's presence at the London show signals where it intends to direct trade attention in the coming sales cycle: experiential, health-oriented stays that can be packaged and sold through agents and operators rather than commoditized city breaks.

Wellness tourism has become one of the more defensible margin categories for intermediaries. Retreat products typically carry longer average stays, higher per-booking values and stronger attachment rates for ancillaries than standard leisure inventory. For agents and tour operators deciding which destinations to feature in 2025 programs, Iceland's push asks them to reframe the country from a stopover and northern-lights play into a year-round wellness destination.

What is Visit Iceland actually putting on the table?

According to the announcement, two product streams will anchor the showcase:

• New wellness retreats, positioned as bookable experiences for the trade rather than direct-only inventory;
• Trade packages built for agents, tour operators and group sellers, designed to make Iceland easier to package and sell.

The move matters for distribution. When a national tourism board invests in pre-built trade packages, it lowers the cost of sale for intermediaries — a signal that Iceland wants volume routed through the trade channel rather than captured entirely by suppliers' direct bookings.

Why wellness, and why now?

Iceland's natural inventory — geothermal spas, remote landscapes, low-density stays — maps closely onto the premium wellness demand that has grown since the pandemic. Retreats also spread arrivals beyond Reykjavik and beyond the concentrated winter season, addressing two structural pressures on the destination: seasonality and geographic crowding.

For sellers, the opportunity is straightforward. Wellness itineraries resist price comparison in a way that hotel-plus-flight city packages do not, which supports margin retention. The trade packages reduce assembly time, which matters for independent agents without contracted Iceland inventory.

What should buyers do with this?

Agents and operators attending WTM can expect Visit Iceland's team to present the retreats as ready-to-sell product, with the trade packages functioning as the commercial wrapper. Buyers weighing appointments should go in with specific questions: commission structures on the retreat inventory, exclusive versus shared distribution, lead times for group wellness bookings, and how the products perform outside peak season.

The absence of disclosed pricing or booking volumes in the announcement means the commercial terms — and whether the retreats deliver meaningful commission levels — will only become clear in conversations on the stand and in subsequent trade releases.

Visit Iceland's appearance at WTM will give the trade its first structured look at how the wellness positioning converts into sellable, commissionable product for the year ahead.