The Incident Guard Launched to Strengthen Safety in Icelandic Tourism
Today marked the launch of The Incident Guard, a new reporting platform designed to record accidents, incidents, and near misses in the tourism industry in a simple and standardized way. The aim of The Incident Guard is to strengthen safety, quality, and professionalism across Icelandic tourism.
Saving Time, Improving Oversight, and Supporting Proactive Safety Management
The Incident Guard has been developed with the needs of tourism businesses in mind. Its purpose is to save time, improve oversight, and support proactive safety management. Companies register and manage their own reporting within the system, giving them a clear overview of their safety performance and enabling them to respond to concerning trends before they result in accidents. Each company has access only to its own data, which is not available to other users.
Acting Before Risks Become Accidents
The Incident Guard is built on a simple principle: learning from experience. Similar approaches have been successfully adopted in other industries. By recording incidents in a consistent manner, businesses gain better insight into risk factors, opportunities to identify patterns, and a stronger foundation for prevention and continuous improvement.
Experience shows that most serious accidents are preceded by warning signs. By reporting all incidents—even those that do not result in injury or damage—businesses can take action before risks develop into accidents. The system is not intended to assign blame but rather to promote learning, collaboration, and ongoing improvement.
The Incident Guard is provided free of charge and supports businesses in managing their incident reporting in a simple, professional, and effective manner.
Hanna Katrín Friðriksson, Minister of Industries
"The Incident Guard represents a major step forward for Icelandic tourism. It provides a stronger foundation for the systematic collection of data on accidents and incidents, which will help improve safety, strengthen prevention efforts, and enhance decision-making and policymaking in the years ahead."
Arnar Már Ólafsson, Director General of The Icelandic Tourist Board
"Although The Incident Guard has been established primarily to support tourism businesses in their daily operations, its benefits extend much further. When tourism operators report incidents in a consistent manner within a central database, we gain a comprehensive overview of incidents across the entire country—something we have long lacked. The data will not be personally identifiable nor linked to individual companies, but it will help us understand trends in accidents and incidents nationwide. As such, it will provide valuable input for planning the measures needed to improve safety."
Gísli Níls Einarsson, CEO of Risk Management Ltd.
"It is gratifying to see The Incident Guard become a reality in cooperation with the Icelandic Tourist Board. The system is built on our decades of experience with ATVIK, our incident reporting platform, and on our work collecting and analysing incident data to support preventive measures among businesses and municipalities. Together, we have developed a solution tailored specifically to the needs of Icelandic tourism."
A Collaborative Effort
The Incident Guard was funded by the Ministry of Industries. Over the past several months, the Icelandic Tourist Board, Risk Management Ltd., tourism businesses, and numerous other stakeholders have worked together to develop the platform. The Icelandic Tourist Board will be responsible for the operation and management of The Incident Guard.