Hotels:   The Internet was extremely useful in this respect.  By surfing accommodations in St. Petersburg I found hotels and apartments.  It seemed most hotels did not have a Website and I had to look through all the travel agencies to find rates and availability.  One site out of the UK, Select-A-Room.com, seemed to give cheaper rates but since we decided to stay at an apartment we did not use them.

Here are some other sites I found that may be useful for finding a hotel:

• Saint-Petersburg-Hotels.com
• ALLREZ.COM

If you look on the Web you will find many, many sites.  I am not recommending these, only giving them as a guide.

Many hotels have renovated and non-renovated rooms.  The renovated rooms are more expensive, obviously, and may even be classified with more stars (example, four stars instead of three stars).  If you call a travel agent they will automatically book you into the more expensive room.  A renovated room will be nicer for sure, but just be aware the non-renovated room may be much less expensive.  Generally speaking, a renovated 3-star hotel room will be $80-$120/night, an un-renovated room may be $20-40 less than that.  The 4-star and 5-star hotels can run up to $500/night though they seem to be in the $250-$400 per night category.

Apartments:   When I was searching for hotels I kept seeing apartments for rent from one day to one year.  I thought it might be nice to stay in an apartment rather than a little hotel room.  After looking at many apartment sites we settled on a site that only had four apartments listed, however, these same apartments seemed to be on multiple sites, so I assume the owners register with many agencies.  The agency we used is: St. Petersburg Apartments.

A sister agency, with more apartments is Petersburg-Lodging.com.

Here are some other sites to check:

• Oksana's.  (Interesting picture of Oksana here).
• Travel.Inc.Ru.
• Russian Apartments.
• St. Petersburg Travel Guide.

We did all our corresponding by e-mail, Fax, and Western Union!  Some apartment Web sites have an area to check the availability of individual apartments but others require that you e-mail them to check availability.  I skipped those that didn’t have an online availability check because I didn’t want the hassle of waiting for a response.  With the above sites you can check immediately if the dates you want are available.  It seems almost all the Web sites I visited had numerous pictures of each apartment.  Most apartments are owned by individuals who rent them out rather than being owned by a company.  Some have a washing machine and some don’t but they are fully furnished including linens (basically like a hotel) but maid service may be weekly instead of daily.

We selected a 2-bedroom apartment where one side faces Nevsky Prospekt and the other side faces the Frontanka River, for 10 nights.  The apartment was available for the dates we wanted and we contacted the agent by e-mail and she responded that since we would be staying outside the high season the rate would be $100/night.  This is cheaper than a small room at a 3-star hotel.  For $20 she would meet us at the airport and take us to the apartment.  For another $24 per person she will register our visas (a hotel may do this for free).  To reserve the apartment we had to send the first nights rent of $100 (in US dollars) by Western Union to Larisa (she gave all the details) in St. Petersburg.

(Nevsky Prospekt is the main street in St. Petersburg.)