Places that have things like free parking, and a free hot breakfast bar; priced high enough to keep out the riff raff but not so high as to be considered luxury places, located near a highway exit on the outskirts of town? Holiday Inn Express is my go-to place when traveling but they seem not to have chain hotels in Iceland.
Are there riff raff in Iceland? 
I looked in hotels.com for places with parking and free breakfast. Do any of these look like what you want?
https://www.hotels.com/search.do?resolved-location=COUNTRY%3A10233075%3AUNKNOWN%3AUNKNOWN&f-amid=2048,16384&destination-id=10233075&q-destination=Iceland&q-check-in=2019-11-30&q-check-out=2019-12-07&q-rooms=1&q-room-0-adults=2&q-room-0-children=0
You could take a look at
Icelandair Hotel Reykjavik Natura
Nautholsvegur 52
101 Reykjavik
- which is next to Reykjavik (not Keflavik) airport. And there are others in the same chain in Iceland, apparently. It’s more than 10 years since we were there, so I can’t claim to know what it’s like right now, but at the time I think it was a fair match for what you are looking for.
That’s where you’ll find an airport. Here it is.
j
PS: Everything in Iceland is priced high enough to keep the riff-raff out.
PPS: News of a tourist attraction for you.
‘Highway exits’ is what they don’t have much of. I mean, yeah, ok, sometimes the big main road around the coast has two lanes, but we’re talking about a place that has three hundred thousand people in the entire country. Getting a quick exit out of town is really not going to be a problem
(I was in Iceland last year. Freaking expensive - but worth it)
Yup, looks like something along the lines of what we’re looking for. We understand our travel style (exclusively car based, long distance driving, staying in Holiday Inns by the interstate exit in the surburbs, mainly chain restaurants) might not translate well to Europe but we’re still toying with the idea of traveling to Europe. My sister wants to got to the UK and Ireland but I’d rather go to Iceland first so I can get a feel for driving in Europe where they drive on the right, and it’s also significantly cheaper to fly there since Icelandair serves MSP.
NM
I know nothing of Iceland but you won’t find your travel method available in the U.K.
I’m in the UK, what part of their travel method do you think isn’t available here?
Note that you need to get the expensive rental car coverage in Iceland. The cost of having a tiny ding repaired can be astronomical. A one-day rental with insurance (pick-up in Akureyri, drop-off in Reykjavik) a few years ago was several hundred dollars.
Some advice that might be of interest to you, if you are intent on moving around this may not help, but we were there last October and this is where we stayed. Really nice and much more reasonably priced than the hotels (especially for 4 people).
Much is made of the expense of Iceland and sure, some things can come as a shock but as you can see from the link above, nice apartments are not ridiculously expensive and with kitchen facilities you can eat very reasonably (eating out is expensive no matter where you go but the supermarkets aren’t excessively so). Alcohol is pricey but again, if you aren’t big drinkers then buying a £10 pound bottle of wine from the offiiclal booze shop is hardly going to break you, 500ml cans of beer were the equivalent of £2 each. Car hire is not expensive (but fuel is)
The tourist attraction prices are expensive but the scenery and much of the natural attractions are completely free (and of far more interest I’d say).
We did the Blue Lagoon and to be honest we much preferred The Secret Lagoon (much cheaper too). I also highly recommend seeking out the municipal pools that are dotted all over, all the ones we visited were really nice with complimentary access to steam rooms and hot tubs as a rule. (and again, very reasonable)
As a counter example, a six day hire last year was £160 with Avis (a very nice Golf) and taking out a seperate worldwide car-hire insurance excess policy for a year to cover all of pocket eventualities was £65 on top of that. The one-way rental is always a pricey option and I’d advise against it if you possibly can.
I don’t want to hijack this too much, but has anyone here ever booked a self-driving vacation in Iceland? I’ve linked to one of several sites that offer similar deals. My husband and I would like to do one of these.
Yes, that’s exactly what my family did last year. It was AMAZING. Ten out of ten. Would recommend. If I win the lottery…
My only regret is that we didn’t really go for long enough, so we didn’t get all the way round the island. Our holiday style is - go to a place, see all the exciting things moderately close to one town, move on, see all the exciting things round the next town… We tend to stay about three days per stop. So we only managed Reykjavik - Akureyri - Reykjavik, but with loads of side trips to see history/nature in different places on the way. I’m sad we didn’t get down to the southern glacier, 'cos those things ain’t gonna last forever. But if you love medieval history or volcanos, you can definitely get your fix on. Ask me anything! 
One of my co-workers went to Iceland on a delayed honeymoon, and they rented a camper van and traveled that way - saved some cash by cooking their own food most of the time. They loved it. The idea of staying in a chain hotel in a place like Iceland doesn’t excite me, but YMMV, of course. (I’m more a small family-run hotel or B&B kind of girl, generally.)
And to add to the above post, when I was there I learned that it’s completely legal to camp by the side of the road in Iceland, just as long as you’re gone by 8am, if I remember correctly. So a lot of people will rent a camper van, and just find a spot to pull off the road when the get tired, or pull into a picnic area and spend the night.
Hotels in Iceland might be four times what you’d expect to pay. It’s an interesting place, and I have only been there once and am no expert. But I’d consider AirBnB type places, which are more reasonable and probably nicer.
I have friends who enjoyed driving around the island. I heard insurance is not cheap, and road conditions aren’t always great. But the island has a lot of desolate beauty. Driving makes more sense in other parts of Europe, if you really think it’s worth the aggro.
I noticed the Hotel Reykjavik was touting their super breakfast buffet, but there was no mention of “free” and I didn’t see details of what it offered. It might be cool if there were smoked eels instead of the sometimes weird egg concoctions you get at Hampton Inns.*
Places in Reykjavik listed on TripAdvisor are said by reviewers to have really nice free breakfasts, but at $217-285 a night you’d expect that (no mention of eels though).
I’m going to guess at the very least the chain restaurant part. Typically, someone who prefers chain restaurants, hotels, etc when they are traveling prefers chains they are familiar with - it’s not that there is something better about chain restaurants, it’s that the food is generally similar from location to location and if I like the food at the location near home, chances are excellent that the location 100 miles form home has the same menu items prepared the same way. Nandos is a chain, but they only have locations in four states in the US so most people in the US would not be familiar with it. I’m not sure how many popular US chains also exist in the UK- but my guess is that most of those that do are the fast food, McDonalds/KFC sort rather than the Applebee’s/Chili’s casual dining type or the Denny’s/Perkins diner type.
When we went and drove the ring road (2017), we AirBnBed everwhere except Hof and Egilsstaðir and were really happy with the accommodations. (PM me for pics!)
Getting a feel for driving on the right, I’m guessing.