Icelandic tour operator chose Vilnius for international growth

Arctic Adventures, an Icelandic adventure tour operator, has announced plans to open its first office abroad in Lithuania. The company is looking to hire around 75 employees for their Vilnius team within the next three years.

Arctic Adventures was established in 1983, and primarily focused on rafting activities. Today, it offers a large variety of one-day tours and multi-day tours in Iceland, including glacier hikes, trekking and even scuba-diving. Arctic Adventures had its big break in 2015, when the business received new owners, who took it from 6.5 million to 50 million in annual turnover in less than four years.

To drive this trend forward, the company has decided to expand internationally, and the highly skilled, English-speaking Lithuanian workforce made Vilnius a perfect location for the company’s first foreign office.

“We studied well how big international businesses have succeeded in Vilnius and saw that the quality and education of the staff was high,” Styrmir Thor Bragason, the Managing Director of Arctic Adventures Vilnius office and Director of Sales and Marketing at Arctic Adventures, said.

Having around 300 employees in Iceland, Arctic Adventures is planning to employ up to 75 people in the Lithuanian capital. “We are considered a good place to work at in Reykjavik and are hoping to become an attractive company to work for in Vilnius as well,” Styrmir Thor Bragason explains.

The company will set up three departments in Vilnius – IT, Sales and Marketing, and Customer Service – that will serve the company’s worldwide clients while improving its online presence.

“The Global Business Services industry has been growing for over a decade in Lithuania, performing many supporting functions for global businesses. However, the backbone of the industry from the very beginning was IT and customer service operations. For instance, not long ago Marketing was still a rare function in Lithuanian GBSs. Therefore, such investors as Arctic Adventures are very important, because they make the industry more multifaceted and create jobs for a wider range of specialists,” states Virginijus Sinkevičius, the Lithuanian Minister of Economy.

According to Managing Director of Invest Lithuania Mantas Katinas, the Lithuanian talent pool already has a good track record of helping businesses with a strong online component grow.

“Driving sales online is a multi-fold strategy, which is made possible only by teams that follow the latest trends and never stop learning – the kind of talent Lithuania has to offer,” Mantas Katinas says.

The new office in Vilnius will serve Arctic Adventures in the decision to go from being a local business in Iceland to becoming a well-recognized global player. As part of this plan, the company, currently working under www.adventures.is, is moving to a new web address – www.adventures.com – next year. Currently, Arctic Adventures has around 300 staff members across Iceland, to be joined by new colleagues in Vilnius.