Recommendations for DenRus travel agency

In addition to any information you get here, be sure to go to Cruise Critic, as that's the busiest site for cruises. Here's their message board that includes St. Petersburg: Link. Having read some of these messages, the consensus is that you get a much better tour for much less money by using a Russian company than you do with the ship's excursion. Besides DenRus, other choices that are often recommended are Red October, Alla Tour, and SPB Tours. I haven't used any of them, so I can't give more specifics. Using Cruise Critic, you can sign up for a Roll Call for your sailing, meet others who want to join a tour with you, and thus cut the costs while still having a smaller group and a more customized itinerary compared with the ship's tours.

We used Alla Tours (http://www.alla-tour.com) in St. Pete and they were fine. We'd made arrangements ahead of time via email and made payment after the tour. Enjoy St. Petersburg!

We also used Alla tours for a two-day tour in St. Petersburg. DenRus is one of the tour companies we considered. They are a legitimate tour operator so I wouldn't hesitate to use them. There's also another operator called Red October (but they may have merged with one of the other two). These are all considered good tour providers for St. Petersburg. We chose a "strenous" tour with Alla (I'm not sure they still offer that). We shared a 12 passenger van with 8 other people from the cruise ship, a driver and a guide. The tour allowed us to see all the major sights in St. Petersburg in two fast paced days. The strenous tour doesn't stop for lunch, we packed a snack/lunch from the boat - which worked out well. Expect to pay half as much, or less, than a cruise tour. You can choose the size and itinerary of your tour from a range of options (and prices). You will also see things more efficiently. The tour busses are much larger and often cater to people with limited mobility - both of which can slow things down. Also expect the cruise ship to advertise their excursions heavily prior to St. Petersburg. We sailed on Princess. The ship shamelessly insisted no one could visit St. Petersburg without a visa unless they were on a cruise sponsored tour. That isn't the case at all. Communicate with your tour ahead of time, make sure you have the documents they tell you to have and you will have no problem getting through immigration. We were also among the first off the boat. Instead of going to the assembly area for the cruise tours, we went straight to the gangway. We met our tour guide long before the cruise tours were coming off the boat. Unfortunately, a handful on our tour mistakenly went to the assembly area so we had to wait for them - otherwise we would have had a good hour head start on the cruise tours.