St. Petersburg shore excursion company

Hubby and I have decided to cruise the Baltic on the NCL Getaway in August 2017. Prior to booking we always research shore excursions and St. Petersburg is a big excitement for us. Does anyone have any recommendations of a small private company to utilize for a 2 day shore excursion? I am leary about just doing a google search for one in St. Petersburg especially due to visa issues. ;)

Thanks for any insight!

Kim

They are wonderful. And we are using them again. Highly recommended. We are doing the two day premium tour this time. http://www.itravelspb.com.

Instead of doing a Google search do a search on this board and you will find multiple threads on this subject. There are really no visa issues as all the tour companies take care of that. DO NOT believe the cruise line. Even as long ago as 8 years back when I did this cruise and only a couple of local tour companies were in existence they still handled everything despite what Princess tried to tell us. Alla aNd SPB tours get lots of mention these days

There are a gazillion threads and posts about various private tour companies in St. Petersburg. The three most recommended are, in alphabetical order, Alla, SPB and TJ Travel. (We used one of those). Read the reviews here and on Trip Advisor; compare their itineraries; and then decide which works best for you.

I agree with all the previous posters. Yo just ask which one is good, well they all are good. Some are better, but everyone who has used a private tour company thinks theirs was the best. Just on the first page or two of this forum, you will see several threads just dedicated to this subject. We simply cannot recommend one for you, YOU have to do some of the legwork. Read back a few pages and get a feel for the top companies, email them, go to your roll call and see what others on your cruise are doing, then pick the one you feel most comfortable with. Just stick to the top groups and you cannot go wrong.

Cheers

Len

If you find your "Roll Call" here for your cruise, you'll be able to make contact with other people going on the same cruise. Some of them may even be booking tours that you could join.

By far the most popular tour companies on Cruisecritic seem to be SPB and Alla Tours but that doesn't mean they are the best.

You'll find reference to several St. Petersburg tour companies here. All are highly regarded, and any will come up with a tour you will enjoy. The trick is to contact a few of them and see which one you feel is most responsive to what you want in a St. Petersburg tour. A private tour for two will be expensive; with most companies they will assist you in joining a group tour of up to 15-16 persons from your ship to keep the cost down, if you don't want to go all out with a private tour for just yourselves.

I agree that several companies are often mentioned positively on this board. We just returned from a Baltic cruise with Princess and our TA booked us in SPB via Viator, who put us with Aventura Tours, a new affiliate of Viator. We had a very positive experience with them. We ended up as the only two customers on this tour, so "private" though paid the small-group rate, and they did not appear to cut a single corner. Stan (guide) and Sergei (driver) did an excellent job of presenting SPB highlights in a professional, courteous, and good-humored way. Just fyi in case you are looking broadly at options.