Thread: St Petersburg & Beyond

we are going on the St Petersburg & Beyond cruise on Island Sky in July. Anyone else going on this? Anyone been on this and has advice/recommendations re ports of call? WIll get some independent time in St Petersburg - best thing to do?

The best thing to do in St. Petersburg is certainly to go sightseeing, since it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world with a lot of great museums, magnificent palaces and lots of other sights. The biggest or the second biggest museum of the world is the Hermitage, which is certainly worth a visit, as are a few other must-see places: Peter-and-Paul fortress, St. Isaac's cathedral, the Church-on-Spilt Blood, the Russian museum, Usupov palace, the summer palaces in Tsarskoye Selo, Peterhof and Pavlovsk.

thanks will look further at all of those

I suggest looking at doing a tour with SPB Tours. We used them for 2 days and they did a wonderful job of taking us everywhere and we got to see everything. Price is good and groups are very small - ours was 10 people.

Pete

Originally Posted by Cruise Planner

I suggest looking at doing a tour with SPB Tours. We used them for 2 days and they did a wonderful job of taking us everywhere and we got to see everything. Price is good and groups are very small - ours was 10 people.

Pete

Pete - Thanks so much for once again supplying some great detailed advice to cruisers in need. Your knowledge of lines & destinations is astounding sometimes.

Ckelbourne - Welcome to CruiseLineFans - Thanks so much for joining and posting your question. Please do come back and let us know how your cruise and on shore adventures turned out.

You are on a little ship, thus can dock right downtown. I am sure your cruise line have informed you about visas...But just a reminder that if you do a ships tour, or one from an independent provider, they will obtain your visas. but if you use that free time to walk off the ship and around the city, you will have to get your own visa. CJ

We were only in St Petersburg for a day, parked in the container port, a long way from the dock gates, and only coaches were allowed close to the ship.

We went on two tours, arranged by the ship, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, each time we departed or arrived we had to got through Immigration. Outward we had to show our tour ticket, and was given a red disk. This disk had to be given back on your return, and was reissued on the next tour. The disk was your temporary Visa. Please don't ask what would happen if you lost the disk.

Without a tour ticket you had to have a full Visa to visit the city.

I realise St Petersburg has a new cruise terminal since our visit six years ago/

Love all the great St. Petersburg advice - Thanks CruiseLineFans members and Guides - great job!

Originally Posted by Norman

We were only in St Petersburg for a day, parked in the container port, a long way from the dock gates, and only coaches were allowed close to the ship.

We went on two tours, arranged by the ship, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, each time we departed or arrived we had to got through Immigration. Outward we had to show our tour ticket, and was given a red disk. This disk had to be given back on your return, and was reissued on the next tour. The disk was your temporary Visa. Please don't ask what would happen if you lost the disk.

Without a tour ticket you had to have a full Visa to visit the city.

I realise St Petersburg has a new cruise terminal since our visit six years ago/

Yes, the do have a new pier, but sometimes there's alot of ships in port and they still have to use the container pier - that's where we were last year on the HAL Eurodam and it really sucks. The downtown pier is much nicer and easier to use, that's for sure.

We did an all-day tour followed by an evening tour and we were not required to go back through immigration in between the tours, unless of course we wanted to go on the ship, which we chose not to do as the line was too long.

But there is nothing to do and no place to go near the container pier, so unless you're doing an organized tour, you really don't want to get off the ship and walk around. However, if you do have your visa, then you can always take a taxi into town.

It truly is a wonderful and beautiful city - one that you really have to visit. But don't feel like you have to do a tour through the cruise line - it's much better, cheaper, and less crowded to do an independent tour. It's too bad that the cruise line make everyone feel like if they don't do a cruise line tour that they can't get off the ship or they won't get off the ship until everyone else has left - this is definitely not true.

Pete

Yes, the cruise lines can be quite intimidating in trying to hold onto as many passenger's dollars as possible, by discouraging independent tours. As a result of the zeal of the marketing departments to sell, what many think are overpriced, underwhelming bus tours the sales agents in customer service and in letters going passengers before leaving home use highly inaccurate claims about Russian immigration, disembarkation restrictions, risk etc. I've heard industry insiders say that without that intimidation the cruise lines would not have any profits from shore excursions, because, because given the choice between a smaller more intimate, comfortable and feature rich experience and a ship bus tour, there is not much reason the choose the latter.
More and more of each ship's total passenger count are not buying the bus tours however, so expect new schemes like the one that caused so much commotion 2 years ago when they, their their shore agent conspired to create a rule, supposedly from the Immigration officials that independent and visa holding passengers had to wait until 11 am to disembark on 7am port calls. They even produced a letter that looked official and in Russian but Russian immigration officials knew nothing about it until there was a firestorm of protests even at high diplomatic levels. The Ministry of Transportation stepped in, on request from Immigration, and held hearings and discovered the plot.
Those few cruise lines that were not going along with the phony letter and policy actually saw bookings increase a great deal after many people booked on the cruise lines that did participate, cancelled.
Overall, it is probably safest to ignore anything the cruise lines say about Russia and going ashore, the person writing or telling it on the phone has no doubt never been within 5000 miles of Russia and surely can't read Russian immigration laws. When customer service call centers start telling you these things, or even travel agents who repeat the same thing the cruise lines claim, ask "how do you know that" or "who told you that". The answer will probably not be forthcoming. It is not in the script.