Most fleet planning advice is written for markets where demand moves gradually. Iceland does not work that way, and pretending it does is how fleets end up short on compacts in July and sitting on idle SUVs in November.

Flight arrivals are the real demand signal

Icelandic tourism runs almost entirely through Keflavík, which means flight schedules are a far more direct demand signal than general seasonality trends. A shift in international route capacity shows up in rental demand within days, not months, and a fleet plan built purely on last year's calendar month will miss it.

Weather changes what people book, not just how much

A stretch of harsh winter weather does not just reduce demand, it shifts it, toward 4x4 and higher-clearance categories and away from the compacts that carry the summer season. A fleet sized correctly in aggregate can still be badly mismatched by category during exactly the weeks weather turns.

Why this argues for forecasting over fixed planning

A seasonal fleet plan set months in advance cannot react to a route change or a weather shift inside the season. What actually helps is forecasting at the category and location level, continuously, so a reallocation decision happens with a week of runway instead of getting discovered after the fact, when the booking was already lost.

This is the exact problem NetRent's forecasting module is built around, tuned for a market where the demand signal moves faster than a quarterly plan can keep up with.