St. Petersburg - Church on Spilled Blood

The Hermitage - Winter Palace

The Small, Old, and New Hermitages

SS Peter and Paul Cathedral

St. Isaac's

Peterhof, Part 1

Peterhof, Part 2

Catherine Palace

Pavlovsk, Part 1

Pavlovsk, Part 2

Yusupov Palace

Menshikov Palace

Our Intinerary

Visas

Getting There

Hotels

Getting Around

Restaurants

  St. Petersburg - Getting There  
Photo of a pet bear in Decembrists Square, St. Petersburg
Bear in Decembrists Square

Airlines

We flew Lufthansa/United from Dulles to St. Petersburg with a plane change in Frankfurt.

Luthansa carryon luggage tip: When we checked our luggage at Dulles, they weighed our carry-on luggage!  In all my (fairly extensive) worldwide travel (including prior trips on Lufthansa), I have never seen this done before.

The agent said the carry-on couldn't weigh more than 8 or 12 pounds, I can't remember which.  (Their website says 8kg which is 17.6 pounds.)  Otherwise, I would have to check it - it contained valuables and prescriptions, so I didn't want to do that.

(Since they are going to carry it, why on earth do they care which part of the plane it's in, as long as its dimensions are acceptable for carry-on?????)

Now my carryon is on the heavy side; it must weigh 8 pounds completely empty.  So I got my big suitcase (which could weigh no more than 50 pounds) back fron the agent, and put as much in there as I could.

My carry-on was still too heavy, so I took out some books and put them on the counter (which was below the agent's eye level).  Now my carryon was under the weight limit, and she approved it.

As soon as I left the counter, I put the books back in it!!!!  In the future, I will bring some type of plastic bag to offload stuff to while my carry-on is weighed!

Frankfurt Connection

The Frankfurt airport did not have a gate for us.  We had to circle waiting for one, and still didn't have one when we finally did land, so we got off in the middle of the tarmac, and they bussed us to the terminal.

At the terminal, we had to walk a great distance and take a train to another terminal, passing through security twice more in the process, to get to our new gate.  Only to be bussed back out to the tarmac to board, close to where we got off our inbound flight!

Needless to say, this all took quite a while.  We nearly missed our flight, and our luggage didn't make it.  So allow plenty of time for your connections.

Airport Hotel Transfer

I highly recommend having a car meet you at the airport and take you to your hotel.  Your hotel or travel agent can arrange this.  In addition to the driver, there should be a second person who can assist you if your luggage does not arrive.

This happened to us, and believe me, if you do not speak fluent Russian and are not familar with Russian bureaucracy, you will not be able to handle this yourself.  It was a nightmare of lines and forms and uncooperative and even nasty officials that took forever even with a Russian assisting us.

Warning: Specify exactly how much luggage you will have when you (or your travel agent) books the transfer.  Our (terrible) travel agent arranged this, and the car that picked us up was tiny, tiny, tiny.

Fortunately (ha!) our luggage was lost and did not arrive with us.  I say fortunately because it would never have fit in the teeny trunk.  There was barely room for our two carry-ons!

We had to make many phone calls and pay an exorbitant amount of money to correct this for our return to the airport.  They swore that the little compact car that picked us up was the standard size.  The only other choice was a huge van - it was easily big enough for a dozen people and bags!!!