Build Your Own Tour

About the tour

Ready-made programmes are convenient, but every one of them is somebody’s compromise. If you know you want the Hermitage but not the Peter and Paul Fortress, or you have two days and a child who will not last four hours in a palace, the programme is better built to fit you.

Below are the blocks we build it from, with the real time each one takes. You tell us how many days you have and what interests you, and we fit it into a route: allowing for museum opening hours, closing days, the fountain season, the driving time between sites, and the fact that after five hours on your feet everyone runs out of energy.

All tours are private: your own guide, your own car, your own pace.

Blocks in the city

• City tour by car — 3 hours. The main squares, the embankments, the islands. A good way into the first day: afterwards you know where you want to go back to.
• City tour with one site visited inside — 3.5 hours. The city tour plus an interior: St Isaac’s Cathedral, the Church on Spilled Blood, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the cruiser Aurora or the Kunstkamera.
• Boat trip along the rivers and canals — 1 hour. The city from the water. Slots easily into any day from late April to November.
• Walking routes — 2 to 2.5 hours. “Imperial Petersburg”, “Dostoevsky’s Petersburg”, “Jewish Petersburg”. What you cannot see from a car: the courtyards, the passageways, the detail.
• St Petersburg by night — 3 hours. The bridges opening and the floodlighting. Added on top of a daytime programme, never instead of one.

Museums

• The Hermitage — 2.5 to 3 hours. The main route: the state rooms of the Winter Palace and the best of the painting. There is also a version before opening or after closing, through empty halls.
• The Russian Museum — 2 hours. Russian art from icons to the avant-garde. It goes well with the Hermitage on separate days, but not on the same one.
• The Fabergé Museum — 2 hours. The imperial Easter eggs and the jeweller’s art. A compact museum that sits well as a second block after a city tour.
• The Yusupov Palace with the “Murder of Rasputin” exhibition — 1.5 hours. A palace with original interiors and a private theatre.
• The Kunstkamera — 3 hours including a city tour. The first museum in Russia.
• The Sheremetev Palace, Museum of Music — 4 hours.
• For children and bad weather: Grand Maket Russia — 3 hours; Petrovskaya Akvatoria — 1.5 hours; the “St Petersburg for Kids” city tour — 3 hours.
• “The Siege of Leningrad” — 4 hours. A subject of its own that does not mix with the imperial programme; best given its own day.

Imperial country residences

• Peterhof with the Lower Park — 5 hours. The fountains run from late April to mid-October. There is a hydrofoil version across the gulf: the same content, with a trip on the water.
• Tsarskoye Selo with the Catherine Palace — 4 to 5 hours. The Amber Room. The busiest destination of all: entry times are fixed and it has to be planned well ahead.
• Pavlovsk — 4 hours. Quieter and less crowded than its neighbours, with 600 hectares of park.
• Gatchina — 5 hours. Paul I’s castle, the underground passage and the Echo grotto.
• Oranienbaum — 5 hours. The only suburb with original interiors rather than recreated ones.
• The Konstantinovsky Palace at Strelna — 5 hours. A working state residence, with the halls used for summits.
• Peterhof and Tsarskoye Selo in one day — 7 hours. Possible, but tight: both residences in their state rooms only, with no walks in the parks.

Day trips

• Kronstadt — 5 hours, or 7 hours including Fort Rif.
• Vyborg with the castle and Monrepos — 10 hours.
• Veliky Novgorod — a full day. 145 kilometres, the kremlin, St Sophia and Vitoslavlitsy.
• Karelia with Ruskeala — 16 hours. The longest route of all: leaving at 7 in the morning and back by 11 at night.
• The Sablino caves — 5.5 hours.

How it usually comes together

• One day. A city tour with one site visited inside (3.5 hours) plus a boat trip on the canals. Or a city tour in the morning and the Hermitage after lunch, though that already makes for a full day.
• Two days. Day one: the city tour and the Hermitage. Day two: Peterhof or Tsarskoye Selo for half a day, with the canals or the night programme in the evening.
• Three days. The city and the Hermitage, one country residence, and on the third day either a second residence or a museum to suit your interests, plus a walking route.
• A week. Now you can afford a day trip — Vyborg, Novgorod, Karelia — and take the less obvious things in the city: Oranienbaum, Gatchina, the Yusupov Palace, “The Siege of Leningrad”.

What we take care of for you

Museum closing days and cleaning days. The fountain season and the navigation season: in winter the hydrofoils do not run, the canals are closed and the Chinese Palace at Oranienbaum is shut. The fixed entry time at the Catherine Palace. The driving time between suburbs, and the fact that two palaces in one day means no walks in the parks. Age and pace: with children and older guests we build the programme shorter and with breaks.

Click “book now” and tell us how many days you have, how many of you there are, what you have already seen and what you would like, and we will suggest options and work out the timings.