No bears, only beauties

St. Petersburg started a campaign promoting the city on the Neva River. It would cost the City Council about 1 million Euros to place 300 billboards in London, Amsterdam and Paris till the middle of December. Actually, this is the very first promotion campaign of any Russian city abroad. Press tours don’t count as after a week of drinking and dining foreign journalists usually wrote about grim horrors of bloody Putin mother town where wild bears are roaming dark snowy alleys. Probably this gave the idea the promo campaign, “No bears, only beauties”.

One million Euros is definitely not enough to attract more tourists. Although Boston Consulting Group believes that 5.2 million foreign tourists will visit St. Petersburg in 2010 the current situation doesn’t give much room to optimism. Problems with foreign tourists in St. Pete are:
- almost no tourist information
- street names and directions are not dubbed in Roman letters
- service personnel don’t know English and even menus in English at restaurants are rare
- police harassment
- very expensive hotels
- very expensive licensed taxis
- very expensive air flights

All in all a trip to St. Petersburg is a very expensive affair not everyone can afford. Then tourists should at least learn Cyrillic alphabet (it takes no more than an hour) and some Russian phrases. Imagine what kind of service you would get at a Ney York restaurant if you do not know Roman letters and speak only Russian. Waiters in Russia do not know English but they promise not to laugh when you speak Russian.

Via AdMe