Icelandic Parking Tips

As part of the public service remit of this blog, I bring you my handy “How to buy parking tickets in Iceland” and “How to contest a parking fine in Iceland when you have failed to buy your ticket correctly”.

If you park up in Iceland you have to buy a ticket. Don’t work on the fact that nobody else has a ticket in their car window, it’s all done with car registration plates. Pay for your parking at one of the handy machines above. The most important button on this keyboard, at least at the start, is the one next to the Icelandic flag at the bottom right. You can use this to select the English language version of the machine.

Once you’ve got the language sorted, enter your car registration number, the number of hours you want and then your contactless credit card and it all works out.

Except that sometimes it doesn’t.

This is the funky little Kia Picanto that we hired from Lagoon Car Rental (they are awesome by the way). When I entered the registration I included the 21 in the middle of the plate.

This is a stupid thing to do. The registration is happily accepted by the machine, but it is not valid. The proper registration is just “JPL42”.

So of course we got a parking ticket. Wah. Fortunately there’s a website that you can use to lodge an appeal. Double fortunately I’d asked the parking machine for a printed receipt which we could use to give our appeal a bit of extra heft.

So the moral of this story is to not put the year digits into your registration when paying for parking. And to get the receipt to use if you are as daft as me….