How to book Tour in SPB

[HKM]

I'm interested in booking the Alla Comfort Tour in St. Petersburg.  For those of you who have booked with Alla, what's the best and safest way to do it?  From some comments I've read, they only book directly through their web site but it is marked "unsecure" on my browser.  Do you book through another website or a travel agent?  Thanks for your help.

[dogs4fun]

9 minutes ago, HKM said:

I'm interested in booking the Alla Comfort Tour in St. Petersburg.  For those of you who have booked with Alla, what's the best and safest way to do it?  From some comments I've read, they only book directly through their web site but it is marked "unsecure" on my browser.  Do you book through another website or a travel agent?  Thanks for your help.

It is perfectly safe to book through the website - it is encrypted and secure. I don't know what browser you are using but I've attached a photo of my Thunderbird browser.  I checked using both Thunderbird & Chrome browsers - both are secure so I suspect that you are using a browser that is not supported by https when accessing Alla (like maybe Edge). Try booking using Chrome or Thunderbird browsers - they are both encrypted and secure.

If you look at the top of each page, you will see the lock and/or the https (s=secure and if you click on the lock, you will see the it is secure). 

[dogs4fun]

Duh, I meant Firefox browser - not Thunderbird!

So, the browsers that I have checked and found secure are: Chrome, Firefox and Bing. There are other browsers out there and I haven't checked them all. 

57 minutes ago, HKM said:

...web site but it is marked "unsecure" on my browser...

So, easy fix - use Chrome, Firefox or Bing and you will have no issues with security.

Edited January 11, 2020 by dogs4fun

[HKM]

Thanks for your help dogs4fun!  That's what I expected to see.  When the site wasn't secure, I wondered if it were a false site.  I got into the Alla site via another route and it was, indeed, secure. I booked our tour.   Looking forward to both the cruise and the tour.  We've done this one 3 times before and enjoyed each one very much.

[ontheweb]

5 hours ago, HKM said:

I'm interested in booking the Alla Comfort Tour in St. Petersburg.  For those of you who have booked with Alla, what's the best and safest way to do it?  From some comments I've read, they only book directly through their web site but it is marked "unsecure" on my browser.  Do you book through another website or a travel agent?  Thanks for your help.

That's a wonderful tour; we did it way back in 2007. We also ended up as a group of 10 by asking others in our roll call to join. That made the tour less expensive; plus we really bonded with those other cruisers.

[HKM]

18 hours ago, ontheweb said:

That's a wonderful tour; we did it way back in 2007. We also ended up as a group of 10 by asking others in our roll call to join. That made the tour less expensive; plus we really bonded with those other cruisers.

So glad to hear that!  It had really good reviews on TripAdvisor too.  We'd be delighted if anyone on the Roll Call would like to join.  It's a 2-day tour, pretty comprehensive but only 8 hours each day and at a little slower pace than the tours that do everything.  The cost is $285 each.  Details can be seen at alla-tour.com.  We haven't actually signed into this Roll Call yet.  We're Kay and Jerry from Monterey, CA.

[ontheweb]

17 hours ago, HKM said:

So glad to hear that!  It had really good reviews on TripAdvisor too.  We'd be delighted if anyone on the Roll Call would like to join.  It's a 2-day tour, pretty comprehensive but only 8 hours each day and at a little slower pace than the tours that do everything.  The cost is $285 each.  Details can be seen at alla-tour.com.  We haven't actually signed into this Roll Call yet.  We're Kay and Jerry from Monterey, CA.

Again that is a wonderful tour. I'm sure some things have changed since 2007 such as we could get right off the ship while non-ship excursion folks now have to wait. Also, from what I have read, Alla and some other tour operators have branched out to other Baltic ports and offer discounts when booking multiple tours.

 

When we did that tour I remember thinking if we could get a total of 8 on the tour, the cost for us would then be less than the ship's tour. We ended with 10 which was a nice number, large enough to decrease the price per person while small enough that we all got along and bonded with each other.

 

Unless it has changed, you can also customize. For instance someone in our group wanted to visit a synagogue. When told that, Alla said fine as long as no one objected. So that was added. My DW is an art teacher and wanted us to skip lunch to add more time for the Hermitage; that was a little too much for others in the group, but we did take a little time off of lunch to add to the Hermitage.

 

Enjoy, I'm sure you will. And really do join your roll call and see if you can get others to join with you.

Edited January 13, 2020 by ontheweb