BUSINESS

New Cruises Planned For New Year Period

By Maria Kiselyova

The St. Petersburg Times

Cruise tours to Finland, Sweden and Estonia will start leaving from the new terminals on Vasilyevsky Island for the first time at the end of this year.

The first of four cruises will depart on Dec. 30, and the last on Jan. 4. Tourists embarking on four-day trips to Helsinki, Stockholm and Tallinn will be among the first passengers to depart from the new terminals of the Marine Facade port, which is opening in stages. The tourism company Expo Tour, which is organizing the trips, says that the new terminal will offer an increased number of passport checkpoints, which should decrease the time spent going through passport control.

The cruise program has been designed in Russia and will meet the demands and preferences of Russian tourists, said Pavel Kvasnikov, development director of Expo Tour. The ships will be staffed mostly by Russians, and will feature several famous local singers in their entertainment programs.

There will also be 12 to 15 tour buses with Expo Tour-trained Russian guides on each ship. According to Kvasnikov, tickets for the cruises are selling well, and only tickets for standard cabins, starting from 370 euros per adult, remain. The price includes breakfast, a pre-celebration supper and glass of champagne at celebrations.

Expo Tour representatives said they saw their main rivals as cruises leaving from Helsinki, which are slightly more expensive and less accessible to Petersburgers.

The Marine Facade port is an ambitious and controversial project. To enable its construction, 450 hectares of reclaimed land is being built off Vasilyevsky Island to house the marine terminal, accommodation and office buildings. Unlike the old port, the new facility will be able to receive ships that are more than 200 meters long.

Sergei Korneyev, director for the Northwest Russian Tourist Industry Union, said that in the past there have not been enough tourists to fill such large ships in St. Petersburg. He said that previous attempts to organize cruise lines from the St. Petersburg port had failed because they were not promoted enough.

The most recent ferry service to Helsinki was stopped due to a lack of passengers at the beginning of the year after operating for just a few months.

Potential clients simply didn’t get to know about the tours, and used ones leaving from Finland and Estonia, said Korneyev. Right now the financial climate is particularly good for short cruises, as the economic slowdown has made people look for cheaper tourism options, he said.

Kvasnikov said that Expo Tour currently only has four cruises scheduled, with no plans for future development of the route. Korneyev predicted however that cruises from St. Petersburg would develop in the future. He said it was likely that a number of other destinations would be introduced, including the Mediterranean.

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