FERRY BETWEEN SAINT PETERSBURG AND HELSINKI. PRINESA ANASTASIA CRUISE

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On a trip through the Baltic capitals you can not miss two of its great protagonists: Helsinki and St. Petersburg. Among them you can travel both by train and by bus, although without a doubt the best option (perhaps not the cheapest) is to do it on a night boat. Next we tell you how is this ferry between St Petersburg and Helsinki, which is actually a cruise lord, how to book it and how is the process of boarding / disembarking and going through border passport controls.

We travel in the Princess Anastasia Cruise, on the journey from St Petersburg to Helsinki. It leaves at 19:00 from the Russian city and arrives in the capital of Finland at 8 in the morning. The company that operates this cruise is MOBY, we made the reservation directly on their website: //stpeterline.com/.

There are different cabin types, all private. The cheapest is the interior with two bunk-shaped beds, then the interior with separate beds, and the most expensive are the exterior, with a window. All with private bathroom, sheets and towels. We chose the interior with separate beds and paid € 80 for the cabin. We didn't see it necessary to pay more to have a window on a trip that would be night. We also saw sunset from the upper terraces and from the bar.

You cannot arrive to board later than 1 hour before departure. But how long before? We arrived as with a couple of hours in advance and there were already people sitting in the restaurant eating ... So it is possible that 3 hours before they let you go up (if your idea is to arrive early and make the wait inside the boat, better ask for email or social networks at what time you can upload).

In the St. Petersburg cruise terminal (this is its location) you will have to approach the counters of check in (same as when you take a flight) and show the passport plus the reservation. There they give you one card which is worth as boarding pass and as electronic key of your cabin.

By the way, if you do the reverse route and travel to St Petersburg from Helsinki, if your idea is to not stay more than 72 hours in the city and leave again on this cruise, you can benefit from a visa waiver program If you sign up for the organized tours offered by the company. More information.

Then you will have to go to the boarding gate and it will be the moment in which the passport control Russian. Remember to keep the card you got at the entrance to the country! Our question when applying for a visa before traveling to Russia was what date to set as the last day of travel, knowing that we would go on a night cruise. So here we leave doubts, we did well: we must put the date of the day you leave the port, not the day you arrive at the destination.

Once you pass this control, you can now boarding the boat. There they welcome you and you will have the cabin for yourself, and the rest of the common areas, of course!

We expected a ship similar to a cruise, but more modest, and not at all! Is a full-fledged cruise, with its restaurants, its huge lounge with bar, its games room, its theater / cinema, its spa room, etc ... We have the feeling that it was an eighties cruise ship that would make a route through the Mediterranean and that has It is somewhat obsolete. And here he is serving his last years of service.

U.S we upload foodSo we didn't even look at the restaurant menu, but we did have a couple of beers at the bar while we watched the sunset. And there we understood that, although the ticket has left a little more expensive than traveling by bus or train, it is a small whim that was worth it. By the way, the beers cost € 5.50 (paid in €) the large ones of 0,5l and 4 € those of 0,3l. Cocktails from € 7.5.

Here you can see the services that the Princess Anastasia cruise ship has.

So you know, if you have doubts about how to go from St. Petersburg to Helsinki and you consider the option of doing it by boat, it sure is a great decision. We hope our experience in the ferry from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, uploaded on the Princess Anastasia cruise, which we tell you in this post will help you!