You might have noticed that I went to Russia last year and even though I made a point of writing down every penny I spent, it’s taken nearly ten months for it to occur to me to talk about the cost.
How much does it cost to go to Russia? How much does it cost to eat in Russia and get around on the metro and see things like the Kremlin? Let me tell you. I kept a spreadsheet while I was away and I wrote down every last ruble I spent. When I got back, I added columns for categories and did a very little light analysis. I used to work in accounts. It never quite leaves you.
If you really want to look at the details, here is my Russia 2019 Spending Tracker in PDF format.
Once I got to Russia, everything was in rubles, obviously. I have a ruble column but to give you an idea of what it looks like in a currency you recognise, I’ve used sterling. Obviously exchange rates change but for reasons I can no longer remember (most likely Oanda on the first day), I was using 81.3r to the pound. Today, Oanda is saying 88.4946 which would make everything a bit cheaper.
So, first there was a visa. UK tourists like me can’t go to Russia without a visa. Now, the visa itself was £63 and there’s an unavoidable service charge of £38.40 which meant the visa in total actually cost £101.40. Because it was cheaper and easier than getting another lot of train and tube tickets to the London visa office, I paid the postal charge to have it sent back to me a month later when it had been processed and that was another £13.80. And finally, I paid £15.30 for a tourist voucher, which is the visa support document. I was expecting to pay £12ish per hotel/apartment (and there were six of them) so that saved money and hassle. So in total, not including getting to and from the visa office, the visa came to £130.50. That’s why I had to go for at least nearly three weeks – that’s a lot to pay before you’ve even booked the flights.
Accommodation was the bulk of what I spent. £1,016.14 in all. That’s £265.44 for 4 nights in the Ibis in Moscow, £268.14 for 4 nights in the Ibis in St Petersburg, £73.80 each for three nights in an apartment in Murmansk and Ekaterinburg (and I know which was better value!) £139.58 for the Holiday Inn in Perm and finally, £163.73 for two nights at the Veliy up against the Kremlin walls on the way back. For 19 nights, that only works out at £53.50 a night and that’s not so bad. Thank you, Murmansk & Ekaterinburg apartments, for pulling that average so far down! The Veliy pushed it up and it wasn’t a great hotel but for the price, you’re seriously not going to get a better location.
And then there were the flights. I flew direct to Moscow DME from London Heathrow in a cheap-as-chips BA economy seat and it cost £309.32 return. I flew from St Petersburg to Murmansk and that was £103.80 with Rossiya, although right up until I was on the plane I thought it was Aeroflot, since that was who I booked with. I flew from Murmansk to Ekaterinburg with a change in Moscow with Aeroflot and that came to £155.80 and then I flew back to Moscow from Perm with S7 which was £81.06 – bargain! That makes flights in total £649.98. I think I had the rough budget of not going over £800 with flights back when I was booking a little over a year ago.
Oh, go on then. You know I’ve got another spreadsheet. Yes, I worked out the price per mile. It’s approximate. I’m stabbing at approximately the right place on Google Earth. But the London-Moscow return flight was 10p a mile, the St Petersburg-Murmansk flight came in as the most expensive at 17p a mile, the Murmansk-Moscow-Ekaterinburg flight was 9p a mile and my bargain Perm-Moscow flight came in at 11p a mile so not actually the biggest bargain.
But that wasn’t all for transport. There are gaps in that itinerary and I filled those gaps with trains. I took the Sapsan bullet train from Moscow to St Petersburg, which was £65.62 (16p a mile) and I took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Ekaterinburg to Perm, which was £14.98 (8p a mile). So train travel came to £80.60 which is a much more affordable way of getting around, if a lot slower.
Other transport costs include the airport train into Moscow twice (once when I came in from London and once when I came in from Perm) and out of Moscow once (when I went back to London). That’s £6.15 a time. I bought metro tickets and metro journeys (68p a red cardboard ticket / 47p a journey if you put ten on a smartcard in Moscow, 56p a token / 44p a journey on a 10 trip smartcard in St Petersburg and 33p a token in Ekaterinburg), a metro smartcard in St Petersburg (74p; the pay ring in Moscow comes under the header of souvenirs since it was ridiculous and unnecessary and so damn cool!), bus tickets in Perm (25p a go), assorted airport buses (49p from the metro to St Petersburg airport, £1.19 between Murmansk airport & station, £1.16 from Ekaterinburg airport to the station) etc. Transport in total (excluding the intercity trains) came to £45.54 – if you’re interested, transport, this time including the intercity trains, only added up to 5.5% of everything I spent.
Flights and accommodation between them account for 74% of everything I spent on that trip. Some of the others look shockingly low. I spent £116.86 on food and drink. In 20 days, that’s £5.84 a day on average and 5.1% of everything I spent. I didn’t eat out – I don’t anyway – I don’t drink alcohol, I shopped in supermarkets and ate a lot of plastic cheese slices and Milka and it all came to £116.86.
Another thing that was surprisingly low considering I felt like I was shopping all day every day was souvenirs. I spent £101.89 (4.5% of my spending) altogether and half of that was the Moscow metro pay ring (£24.59) and the three CD boxset from the choir I heard in St Basil’s (£24.60). The rest was a couple of souvenir gold coin-medallions, you know the kind. A watercolour print of the Church on Spilled Blood, henceforth called the Speelblod (£5.54). Two miniature Faberge eggs (£7.38 the pair), a piece of malachite, a Hermitage pin badge, the tiniest spoon you’ve ever seen (62p, which felt incredibly expensive for the size of it), a pyrographed wooden signpost magnet, a set of magnetic bookmarks, a Kremlin enamel mug and more postcards than I could ever have realised considering how difficult it felt to ever find them.
Entrances came to £57.81, which was 2.5% of everything I spent. I went in St Basil’s (£12.30), I went in the Kremlin (£8.61), I went on the terraces of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (£4.92). I went in the Peter & Paul Fortress (£9.23 for a combined ticket that included everything within the walls), I went in the Church on Spilled Blood (£4.31), I went in St Isaac’s (£4.31) and up on the colonnades (£2.46) and I went in the Hermitage (don’t know if I said this back in the Hermitage blog: world class museum. Massive, utterly over the top museum. Ordinary adult ticket, £8.61). And then once I left the two big cities, the only thing I paid to go into was Perm Zoo (£3.08, and don’t bother).
My last category is Excursions and this is where it got expensive because I only did two things I categorised as excursions and it came to £83.64 (3.7% of everything I spent was on two trips out!). That’s mostly down to the folk show in St Petersburg, which I wanted to do even before I got there and I think it would have felt incomplete to miss it but in the name of all that’s holy, £72.57 is hellishly and unreasonably expensive. To be fair, it included to-the-door taxi pick-up and drop-off. If it hadn’t been my first night and dark, I could have found my own way by a combination of metro and foot but looking at the website to book direct rather than through the hotel, it’s even hellishly more expensive! £11.07 is also more than I’d have liked to pay for the boat trip around St Petersburg but it wasn’t unreasonable. If I was to pick two luxury unnecessary expenses, it’s the pay ring and the folk show and if I was to go back in time knowing everything I know now, I’d still do them both.
All that means that my twenty days in Russia came to £2,283.28 in total, including visa, flights, trains, buses, food, accommodation, postcards, spoons, folk shows, every penny I spent. And it’s a lot. But then again, it averages out at £114.16 a day, which isn’t so bad when it’s including flights and accommodation. It was meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime big trip when I crossed off Russia, did and saw everything I wanted to see. It was never meant to be done on a shoestring. It was never meant to be 5* luxury either and I spent the first half of 2019 not really going anywhere or doing anything (I’ve already detailed the cost of my four days in Malta, which I seem to remember came to under £200 in total, again including flights and accommodation and food and buses and postcards and so on and I didn’t cost up my trip to Rome but I needed to see the Sistine Chapel and my unspent salary had bulked up my bank account just a little by May). I think there are plenty of people who couldn’t do 20 days in Russia and see and do what I did for that price, not least because other people don’t live off plastic cheese, Pringles and supermarket brand apple juice for nearly three weeks. That wasn’t a cost-saving measure; that’s a thing that’s inbuilt in my very being.
To summarise:
Visa £130.50
Flights £649.98
Accommodation £1,016.46
Transport £126.14
Food £116.86
Souvenirs £101.89
Entrances £57.81
Excursions: 83.64
Total £2,283.28
(The 17r I used for the featured image here is worth about 19p)