Retired Canadian

We used TJ Travel for SPB too (separate review) but we also used them for Berlin. Booking the Berlin tour with TJ gave us a 5% discount on the SPB tour. Boris, our Berlin guide (borisfromberlin@gmail.com), was excellent. He's a transplanted New Yorker who has learned German over the past 2 decades while living in Berlin. He's enthusiastic and covers the history and information about the major sites (how much can one see in 6 hours?) extremely well.

We highly recommend TJ Travel for excursions while taking a Baltic cruise and, in particular, Boris in Berlin and Victoria in St. Petersburg.

My wife and I just got back from a Baltic cruise that included a 2-day St. Petersburg Russia tour with TJ Travel. I can't say enough about how fantastic this tour was. The arrangements were made beforehand via email so that we had all we needed to get through the Russian passport control. Thereafter, our small group of 13 were guided by Victoria who was enthusiastic, professional and thoroughly knowledgeable. Her English was impeccable with very little accent (she teaches English in St. Petersburg) and she was very receptive to questions about Russian life. Our Mercedes van had high speed wifi and bottles of water were supplied to keep us quenched. I won't get into all of the sites we saw (everything of importance in St. Petersburg that one could possibly squeeze into 2 days) and Victoria had a knack for getting us around crowds and delays. She had incredible knowledge of the Hermitage museum having worked there. Our van driver, Anton (call me Tony) was particularly adept at getting through traffic so that we would maximize our touring experience. The tour included 2 "authentic Russian" lunches and a hydrofoil trip to the Peterhof palace which also saved time. Admissions, transportation and lunches were included. All of this for considerably less expense than the excursion offered by the cruise ship. I felt compelled to give Victoria a kiss (and a disproportionately higher tip) before we boarded the ship after our second day. A few days later, we had another wonderful tour run by TJ Travel, this time in Berlin (with Boris, a Yankee) but I'll leave that review for another thread.

I would recommend TJ Travel without hesitation.

P.S. I was apprehensive about paying for the tour by credit card with all of things that can go wrong (exchange rate, fraud) but there were no issues whatsoever. Tatjana made sure of that for us.