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Forum Question Posted By: Replies:
Saint Petersburg
Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Tue February 14, 2012 03:51 PM UTC
We will be in St. Petersburg for 3 days on a cruise in January 2013. We would like to find a reliable agency with local guides to visit the Hermitage and other important points of interest. Any suggestions and recommendations will be welcome.

Thanks.

Carl
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 cl3150 13 replies

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Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Tue February 14, 2012 04:10 PM UTC
Sorry I do not have a recommendation for you because we took the shore excursions provided by the cruise company - which saved us the hassle of applying for Visas - that was taken care of by the company.
As you are travelling in winter I guess you will be packing plenty of warm clothing!

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Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Tue February 14, 2012 07:36 PM UTC
Try the message boards at cruisecritic.com, you will find recent reviews of independent excursion providers, I wouldn't take a recommendation that was more than a couple of years old. We used a private guide and I'm really glad we did, we saw a lot more than the cruise passengers, the itinerary was tailored to what we wanted and we didn't have to wait for people in the gift shop, bathroom or the ones who got lost. The downside is that many of the providers require a private visa which is expensive once you add in the visa cost plus having to use a company to obtain it for you if you don't live near a consulate. I believe there are still some that don't require obtaining a private visa but make sure you are REALLY clear on that, landing in St. Petersburg without the necessary papers and without a ship excursion lined up could mean you spend the day on the ship.

If you go with the ship excursions, you are allowed off the boat under a group visa. This means that you can't wander off on your own.

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Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Tue February 14, 2012 08:32 PM UTC
I think the quality of shore excursions is entirely dependent on the cruise line.
We have only travelled on smaller ships and in St Petersburg arrived on a ship with 680 passengers able to berth at Lieutenant Schmidt's Quay.
I cannot speak highly enough of the organisation,arrangements and standard of the local guides we have had on these tours.

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Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Wed February 15, 2012 01:51 PM UTC
I erred on the dates. We will be in St. Petersburg in late August.

Sorry about the mistake.

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 cl3150 [Reply]
Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Wed February 15, 2012 01:55 PM UTC
Based on your comment, you were probably on the Nautica or a sister ship. We will also be on the Nautica. aving just come off one of their cruises, I like the way they handled things, but in my opinion, their shore excursions were extremely overpriced, a common complaint shared by other passengers.

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 cl3150 [Reply]
Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Wed February 15, 2012 02:47 PM UTC
I was glad to hear that your visit will be in August - our guide gave us some chilling descriptions of winter weather - think Siege 1941!
No we were not on Nautica but an older and slightly smaller Fred Olsen vessel.
The tours were expensive; one couple we got to know took only the St Petersburg tour because of the visa and language complications but did their own thing in all the other ports of call.
My husband, a now rusty Russian speaker was able to get by in St. P. when necessary but said he would have struggled at times on his own. Our Russian guides arranged by the cruise line and theri Agent were excellent.

If there are several other cruise ships due in when you arrive I would think it important, if you can, to engage a local guide well in advance and plan your visits together. The guide should be able to find out how busy the port will be on your 3 days there and work round the larger groups who will be doing the circuit. You could get caught in lots og long queues.
I would think Nautica will be able to berth at eithrt Lieutenant Schmidt's of the English Quay (as we did) rather than in the new larger terminal down river which gives passengers disembarking there a bit of a headstart in the mornings.

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Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Wed February 15, 2012 03:21 PM UTC
The private tour we took was also expensive, perhaps even a little more than the ship excursion, but we were the only two people on it. For that it was worth the price. Maybe the smaller ships have smaller group sizes and not as much hassle but based on the conversation at dinner in the evening and all the complaints, I was really glad we did it. We saw a lot more than anyone at our table and things that we wanted to see, not someone else's agenda, which was important because this was not our first visit to St. Petersburg and we had already seen a lot of things.

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Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Thu February 23, 2012 02:11 PM UTC
Any independant tour operator in St. Petersburg will be able to arrange tours for you without the hassle of getting Russian visas in advance. We used the services of Palladium Travel and they e-mailed us their tour tickets to go ashore without the visas. The price of the tours was lower than with the cruise line.

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 cruiselen [Reply]
Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Thu February 23, 2012 05:18 PM UTC
I'd like to know which agency you used so I can check with them. It is difficult to imagine an agency charging more than a ship, having just taken an Oceania cruise, where the tours were outrageously priced, a very common complaint from passengers in general.

Thanks.

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 cl3150 [Reply]
Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Thu February 23, 2012 06:13 PM UTC
We visited a lot more than the ship tour plus we had a private tour with just the 2 of us, lunch with a local family, so really it should have cost more than the ship's tours. It was quite a few years ago, I don't even remember the name of the company. I honestly never looked at the ship tours because I would have hated to visit St. Pete that way, especially since we were on our 2nd or 3rd visit and had seen a lot of the major sights on our previous visit.

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Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Fri February 24, 2012 09:51 PM UTC
Thank you.

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 cl3150 [Reply]
Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Sun April 8, 2012 11:19 AM UTC
Hello, Carl! I want to share with you my great experience in St. Petersburg. We have been there in the autumn 2011 for 4 days and were staying in the hostel named Pilau, which is situated in the very center of the city. They did not only provide us with excellent living conditions but also offered us a lot of different interesting excursions. So we went to the Hermitage, which is by the way a huge museum absolutely worth visiting, to Pavlovsk and Pushkin - small towns nearby St. Petersburg with their own exciting history and Russian museum with great number of famous paintings. I advise you to turn to this agency for sightseeing and also if you need any housing to book the room in their hostel cause the atmosphere there is really cosy and they offered us all the necessary conviniences!

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 KaterinaIV [Reply]
Saint Petersburg
Re: Three days in St. Petersburg - touring
Posted: Sat April 14, 2012 07:28 PM UTC
Hi! Last summer we hired a tour guide here http://visit-stpetersburg.com/
Amazing tour with friendly guide. We travelled on our own and had a lot of questions so Mariya (really nice director of that agency) helped us in many problems for free and we actually met together inrestaurant"Mansarda". She gave us a book about St Petersburg and made a mini-tour with us. We'll visit that city again.May be in august 2012

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 DavidCo [Reply]
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