Russian City Breaks to the Rescue!

In April, travellers across the world found themselves stranded far from home after the ash cloud from Iceland's volcano eruption caused the biggest disruption to air travel in history.

Russian City Breaks had several clients in Russia at that time, including John and Lib Walton and their friends Martin and Kath Willmott. With their visas about to run out, they decided to get the train to Estonia and work out how to get home from there. One of our Directors, Dan Hornby, was working from our Tallinn office at the time and met them upon their arrival at the train station, determined to help our clients get back to the UK.

John Walton was kind enough to send us the following report:

"When we booked our trip to St. Petersburg and Moscow with Russian City Breaks we were looking for a mixture of culture and adventure and we certainly found it, but not necessarily in the proportions we were expecting!

Thursday, 16th April

When Martin came down to the bar of our Moscow hotel in the evening to tell us that a volcano had erupted in Iceland and all flights across Northern Europe were disrupted we thought he was joking - because that’s the kind of guy he is – but when we switched on Sky News and saw the white smoke billowing out of the mountains we knew it was no laughing matter.  Next morning we checked the status of flights to London and found they were all cancelled.

Saturday 18th April

This was our scheduled departure date and the date our tourist visas expired but there were no flights and no indications that there would be any in the days to come.  This was when we made our first plea for help to Dan at RCB.

Dan swung into action straight away and got back to us with all we had to do to get our visas renewed.  This involved a trip to the consular office at Moscow airport to get a 3 day visa extension and, as none of spoke more than a smattering of Russian, Dan arranged for our guide to come along to act as interpreter.

Sunday 19th April

After a few to’ings and fro’ings to the Airport we eventually got our visa extensions at 2.30pm.  We looked into all the various travel options including train, car hire and coach but couldn’t find a way home.  The direct train was via Minsk in Belarus – no good because that needed a transit visa.  So we put in another call to Dan who said “get on a train to Tallinn.  That’s where I am and we can sort it all out from there”.  ‘Brilliant’ we thought.  How great it will be to have someone who knows the region in detail there for us.

Monday 20th April

And so it turned out.

After an interesting overnight train to Tallinn including an hour-long stop at the Russian border at 4am for customs and immigration checks, there was Dan waiting to meet us off the train at Tallinn station.  He’d made a precautionary booking at a nearby hotel, which was where we repaired to for some much needed proper breakfast.

Suitably refreshed and replenished we then sat with Dan while he tapped away at his laptop looking into all the options.  As it turned out the best option seemed to be to get the Eurostar from Brussels but the earliest available was Friday evening.  So we took it and the rest of our itinerary was dictated by that.  From Tallinn we would take the overnight ferry to Stockholm and then trains from there to Brussels.

As the internet was in overload with everybody trying to find tickets home getting bookings was proving tricky so Dan suggested we confirm our room and go and get some rest whilst he set to with the laptop.  We met later for lunch at one of his favourite restaurants by which time Dan had pretty much sorted it all out!

As it was we had a bonus 2 day stay in the lovely city of Tallinn followed by half a day in Stockholm and an evening in Copenhagen. Not what we had planned but in the circumstances an excellent example of making the best out of a difficult situation."

Summary

We all agreed that Russian City Breaks really pulled out the stops when we got stuck in Russia and for that alone we would give them a 5 star rating but even before we left the service from Dan Hornby and his brother Ben in getting our itinerary together was exemplary. They are very professional and very friendly and we would heartily recommend them to anyone looking to travel the regions they cover.

John and Lib Walton                                Martin and Kath Willmott

The Waltons and Willmotts in Tallinn (unexpectedly!)

Dan with the Waltons and Willmotts

Several hours later, the final itinerary home is printed!