Icelandair

Review by eFreeware

Airline travel scatters details across confirmation emails, loyalty statements and whatever you saved to your phone before leaving home. The Icelandair app is built to pull those threads together for people flying with the airline, and its stated aim is to guide you through the journey rather than just sell you a ticket.

It comes from Icelandair itself, the airline, and sits in the Travel & Local category on Google Play. It is free to download, carries no ads and offers no in-app purchases, so nothing inside it is trying to sell you an upgrade to a better version of the app itself. The rating sits at 4.2 from just over 2,200 ratings, with more than 500,000 installs since it arrived in December 2019.

One place for the whole trip

The core of the app is the booking and journey view. You can search for a destination and book a flight, with the information you have already entered filling itself in, and then keep the booking details in one spot rather than hunting through email threads. That single-location idea runs through everything else the developer describes.

Once a booking exists, the app is meant to be where you manage it. Preordering meals, choosing a seat and adding baggage all happen there, and online check-in produces a boarding pass directly in the app. From that point the boarding pass can go into Wallet or be shared with other travelers on the same booking, which is the sort of small convenience that matters when several people are flying together and one person is handling the admin.

Notifications are the other half of this. Updates arrive at each stage, the developer says, so you stay informed. How useful that proves depends on how much you want your phone prompting you, but for anyone who has ever missed a gate change announcement in a noisy terminal, having the airline push updates directly is the point of installing the app rather than just using the website.

Saga Club status and points on your phone

For frequent Icelandair travelers, the loyalty side is arguably the stronger reason to keep the app installed. Saga Points can be earned and spent, with club and tier status shown. You can also register points for past flights, which covers the case where a trip was taken without the membership being applied at the time.

The card itself exists in two forms. Your Saga Club card works in the app or in Wallet. Both routes mean the physical card can stay in a drawer.

What I like about this arrangement is that it turns the app into something you would open between trips, not only on travel days. Checking where you stand on Tier Credits is a natural thing to do while planning the next booking, and the app puts that next to the search and booking tools rather than in a separate loyalty app.

Booking, check-in and the boarding pass flow

Booking inside the app is straightforward in concept: search, book with details already filled in, and keep the confirmation with the rest of the trip. A session timeout applies to the booking flow.

Check-in is the part most travelers will value. Doing it in the app and receiving the boarding pass there keeps everything in one place. Passing that boarding pass to Wallet keeps it handy, and sharing it with others on the booking means everyone in the group has their own copy without forwarding screenshots around.

The update history also mentions meal and seat links being fixed for bookings with three or more flight segments. That detail is worth noting for anyone on a multi-leg itinerary.

What it asks of you, and where it is narrow

The plainest thing to say about this app is that it is an airline's own tool. Everything in it is organized around Icelandair flights, Saga Club membership and the journey stages that follow from a booking. That is not a shortcoming in itself, but it does define the audience: this is for people who fly with the airline, not a general-purpose travel organizer for comparing carriers or holding bookings from several airlines in one place.

Saga Club features assume membership. Status, Tier Credits, earning and using points, and the virtual card all relate to that program. Booking, check-in and the boarding pass remain useful to anyone with a reservation.

The app is free and has no ads and no in-app purchases, so there is no cost question to weigh. What it does require is that you are comfortable running your trip through the airline's own channel. Fixes cover app startup, lounge access display for US flights and navigation back from gold parking.

The 4.2 average from over 2,200 ratings suggests a broadly positive reception without being unanimous. I would read that as an app that does its job for most people most of the time, which is a reasonable bar for something you open intensively for a few days and then ignore until the next trip.

Who gets the most from it

The clearest fit is a regular Icelandair passenger with a Saga Club account. For that person the app combines two things usually kept apart: the practical side of a trip, from booking through boarding pass, and the loyalty side, from points to status. Having both behind one icon is a genuine simplification, and the virtual card and Wallet option mean the membership is available without carrying anything extra.

A less frequent traveler still gets value from the journey tools. Booking, seat selection, bags, meals, check-in and a boarding pass on the phone cover the whole arc of a trip, and sharing the pass with companions on the same booking is a small but thoughtful touch for group travel. Someone flying Icelandair once a year could reasonably install it before the trip and remove it afterward.

The app is aimed at travelers flying with Icelandair. The focus here is deliberately on a single carrier's customers and their journey with that carrier.

A worthwhile install for Icelandair flyers

I would install this if Icelandair is my airline, whether I fly a few times a year or more often than that. The combination of booking, check-in, a boarding pass that can live in Wallet, and Saga Club status and points in the same app covers the practical and the loyalty sides of a trip without much friction, and the absence of ads and purchases keeps it clean.

If I were choosing where to put my attention, the loyalty features would be the deciding factor for a frequent flyer, while the check-in and boarding pass flow would be the deciding factor for everyone else. Either way, the app is doing what an airline app should: holding the details of a journey in one place.

It is free, it has been updated recently with fixes to startup, lounge access display and multi-segment meal and seat links, and it has a solid if not perfect rating behind it. For Icelandair passengers who want their trip and their points on their phone, that is enough to justify the download.

What's new in version 4.5.2

Android app boot up fixed to not leave a blank screen in some cases Fixed gold parking back to app navigation. Lounge access displayed correctly for US flights. Adding session timeout for booking flow. Meal and seat links fixed for bookings with 3 + flight bounds. General bug fixes and optimizations.