Saint-Petersburg is the most popular tourist destination in Russia. There are more than 700 tour agencies and 130 accommodation facilities (able to host around 30 thousand people) in the city.

Most of the hotels are situated in the historic heart of the city or close to it. More than 300 restaurants offer different dishes of national and foreign cuisines.

Saint-Petersburg has a large resort system, constituting a modern polyfunctional complex for all-year-round medical treatment and vacation. Nowadays Saint-Petersburg is the only Russian naval gateway to Europe, important sea port, functioning about 10 months a year. There are more than 150 thousand cruise tourists coming to the city each year. Saint-Petersburg is one of the most significant Baltic seaports accepting ocean liners of the leading world cruise and passenger companies.

St. Petersburg ranks with the most beautiful cities of the world - Paris, London, and Berlin. It is one of the ten cities considered to be particularly attractive for visiting.

Every year more than two million guests from many countries visit St. Petersburg. The leading countries regarding the number of tourists coming to St. Petersburg are Finland, Germany, the USA, Sweden, and France. People often call St. Petersburg either North Palmira or Northern Venice because of its exceptional romanticism and a great number of rivers and canals.

St. Petersburg is split by the River Neva and its tributaries, with further sections delineated by the course of the canalized Moyka and Fontanka rivers, all of which conveniently divide St. Petersburg into a series of islands.

St. Petersburg's centre lies on the south bank of the Neva, with the curving Fontanka River marking its southern boundary. The area within the Fontanka is driven by a series of wide avenues, which fan out from the most visible landmark on the south bank of the Neva, the Admiralty.

Many of the city's greatest sights and monuments - the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the Mikhailovsky Castle, the Summer Garden and St. Isaac and Kazansky cathedrals - are located in and around Nevskii Prospect, the main avenue.

Across the Neva is Vasilevskii Island, the largest of the city's islands, and there are some of St. Petersburg's oldest institutions as well as some fascinating museums on the Strelka, the island's eastern tip. The north side of the Neva, the Petrograd Side, is a home of Peter and Paul's Fortress, which construction is seen as marking the foundation of the city itself. Beyond the Fontanka River, the two most popular destinations are Smolny, from where the Bolsheviks orchestrated the October Revolution, and the Alexander Nevskii Monastery.

There are few other cities that can offer so many stunning attractions and intriguing moods as St. Petersburg - the City of Tsars. St. Petersburg is within easy reach of the capitals of Europe and Scandinavia and it offers luxurious accommodation, expert destination management companies and very good travel services.

It is generally known that the best time to admire the North Palmyra's masterpieces is a miracle time of "white nights" from May 25 to July 20 (the lightest nights between June 11 and July 2). Most of the hotels are packed with tourists at that period. So that it is better to reserve a hotel room in advance.