Heading to Iceland? It may be cheaper to park your plane than your car – report

Budgeting for a trip to the land of fire and ice, and tossing up between taking the private jet or renting a Dacia from Hertz?

In a strange ‘who actually thought to check this’ story, the Icelandic publication Fréttablaðið.is reports it is cheaper to park your personal aircraft than it is to park a car in downtown Reykjavík.

Spending five days on the ground in Iceland, flying a five-seater private jet like an Embraer Phenom 100E will set you back ground fees of ISK35,485 ($AU375).

The fees are based on the aircraft’s weight (the small Phenom has a maximum take-off weight, or MTOW, of 4750kg).

For those running the numbers, you start with a landing fee, which the main Reykjavík airport charges at ISK1330 per tonne ($AU14) to the nearest whole tonne.

Smaller airports are even cheaper, at ISK660 per tonne ($AU7.00). That means our Phenom gets calculated at 5000kg.

Each passenger pays ISK1600 to disembark ($AU17) and then you pay ISK1545 per tonne ($AU16) for the first 24 hours (although the first six hours are free), the same again for the next 24 hours, and then ISK945 ($ AU10) for every 24-hour period after that.

For five days, with landing fees, you get to the ISK35,485 figure quoted by the publication.

At a parking garage in the center of Reykjavík city, the parking fees are calculated at ISK440 per hour ($AU4.70) between 8.00am and 8.00pm, and then an additional ISK210 per hour ($AU2.20) overnight.

At ISK7800 per 24-hour period ($AU82) for five days, the fee comes to ISK39,000 ($AU411) to park your car.

By Australian standards, that’s quite expensive.

We did a quick scan of five-day parking in both Melbourne and Sydney CBD, and the most expensive we could find was $211 for five days at the Wilson Parking on Harrington Street in Sydney.

Even at Melbourne Airport – which isn’t known for cheap parking – five days of valet caps out at $236.

Now, we’re sure you could find a cheaper car hole to ditch the Dacia rental car for a week, and given larger plans like a Dassault Falcon 900 have maximum take-off weights of more than 20,000kg, the aircraft parking fees can get really pricey, really quickly.

However, any hard-working jet wouldn’t be on the ground longer than the initial ‘free’ six hours to get the meter started, let alone ticking for five days anyway.

But in a world where the cost of parking is just another pressure point on the ever-growing list of living expenses, it’s good to know that there are pinches at every point of the economic scale.

Our advice would be to avoid both, by flying commercial and only renting a car for when you’re driving it – but you do you.