Russian hotels vs river cruiseship as hotel

[dandylion]

Many posters seem agreed that the bus trip from the river cruise docks into both St. Petersburg and Moscow wastes valuable vacation time. Are there any companies left still using hotels in these cities ? If not, does any company use a docking site closer to the center of town? We're planning a river cruise for 2010 and can't find any company still using hotels. Thanks.

[pjtraveler]

To my knowledge all the companies use the river terminals which are not close to the center. On our Viking tour in July, however, on the days when we were scheduled to be out all day, we had very nice boxed lunches. In fact, we snacked off items in the lunches for several days. On the other two days in both cities, we returned to the ship for lunch because optional tours or free time were scheduled. In St. Petersburg, some of the sites that we visited were not at all near the city center, but the traffic was not bad.

 

In Moscow, the first day (a Friday) was rainy, and the traffic was horrendous. I was glad we had box lunches that day because I might have opted to stay on the ship and forego the afternoon visit to Red Square (glad I didn't have that opportunity as it was a grest experience even in the rain). We were very tired that day because of an unexpected interruption of our non-stop flight from ATlanta to Moscow because of a mechanical problem. We spent 20 hours in Reyjavik, Iceland, an unexpected adventure but at least we now have Icelandic stamps on our passports.;)

 

Saturday and Sunday in Moscow, the traffic was not a problem at all, and we relatively quickly made it to our planned visits.

[Coral]

I have done a land vacation in Russia and also a river cruise in Russia.

 

My land vacation was so much better! I regret that I changed my mind and gave in to a river cruise 2 years ago (because it was cheaper).

 

I would look into land trips.