22 August 2015 Costa Luminosa Baltic Cruise

Hi

We are on the above cruise and wanting to book a St Petersburg shore excursion with Alla Tours. There are three options, the Grand Tour and the Comfort Tour, but we want to do the third option, the Imperial which includes a trip to the relatively newly opened Faberge Museum ( it has 9 Faberge Eggs and a load of other Feberge jewellery/trinkets). Alla have said though that they need 10 people to run the tour and there is only 5 of us. Is anyone else interested in doing it? SPB tours do a similar tour but don't guarantee a trip on the subway (apparently the stations are very opulent and worth seeing) neither are lunches included.

Interested to hear from anyone about this

Welcome to CC.

Best bet is to see if your cruise has been listed in the Rollcall forum, if not you can start:

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=488

Thanks - I'll try that. I'm new to this so still working out what I am doing :):)

We are on the same cruise. I do not think it is listed in the roll calls. We are interested. What is the website for this tour?

Hi Captiveguru

it is http://alla-tour.com/

We have booked to do the 2 day Grand Tour but would prefer to do the 2 day Faberge Tour. If you are interested too, they may run it. This isn't a Costa tour, as theirs didn't seem to do as much. I don't know how much you have looked into tours in St Petersburg, but as long as you are on a recognised tour you don't need a visa. I have researched Alla and they seem to have good reviews etc. If you contact them and ask them about the tour, let me know so that we can all push to do the Faberge tour.

I asked Alla to compare/contrast the Grand And Imperial tours.

The Grand tour includes St. Isaac's, Yusupov Palace and a hydrofoil ride. The Imperial Splendors tour trades those for the Faberge Museum.

They did offer to take us to the Faberge for 90 minutes in the evening for 45 USD PP.

Frankly the GT sounds better to us and we have booked it.

See you on board!

Fair enough. It was hard trying to decide between the two tours, but I have a bit of a fascination with the Faberge eggs......but like you say, it meant missing a couple of the other places. We haven't decided about the evening tour yet but think we will all have a great time on the Grand Tour. See you there......I'm really looking forward to it 😀😀

Just printed my Grand Tour tickets from Alla...

hehe.........exciting eh?

The tour looks so much better than the cruise ship's one.

Are you at all concerned about getting through Russian immigration in time to meet the Alla Tour? Do we need to sleep in the stairway in order to be first off?

We dine at 7 tonight. Table 251 (Upper Taurus). Come by if you can...

Thanks for stopping by at dinner. We should have exchanged cabin #'s. Have you read tomorrow's program? It implies that pax not participating in Costa's excursions cannot get off before 10:00 AM.

I am headed for the customer service desk to discuss... Can you join me?

Just got back. Customer Service says not to worry, but Costa excursions will have some kind of priority.

We are thinking we will be ready to disembark no later than 7:45 AM.

He said there might be a gangway on Deck 1 for "independent" travelers, but other wise it would be Deck A like today in Helsinki.