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Hotels in St. Petersburg: why we removed all collections
Editorial Position
Updated:8 min1,686 words

Hotels in St. Petersburg: why we removed all collections

Here lay five hotel roundups for Saint Petersburg: three, four, and five stars in the center with breakfast, hotels on the main avenue, and a separate list for wedding trips. All five have been removed in full.

A hotel roundup is a promise. It promises that the reader will arrive, check in, pay, and get what was described. No part of that promise can be backed today by a publisher based in the European Union. EU law prohibits such services and their advertising, and foreign cards do not work there.

💡 At a glance:

  • which five roundups were removed and what exactly in them stopped working
  • why the promise of "arrive, check in, and pay" no longer holds
  • where the line runs between writing about a city and advertising a service
  • which cities in the Baltics and Central Europe remain in our live sections
  • Last updated: 09/2026

Why we deleted these guides

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, and after that date the hotel lists on our site continued to function as a commercial offer. We consider that a mistake and have corrected it in full: five pieces have been taken down, and the old URLs in all language versions now redirect here.

Updating them was impossible in substance. A hotel roundup contains nothing but an offer: removing the offer means removing the text. So this was not a matter of editing, but of choosing between publishing and deleting.

It is also worth explaining why we did not leave these pieces in the archive with a service note. An archived page remains indexable and continues to answer the same search query, meaning it continues to work exactly as it did before, only with a fine-print disclaimer. A reader arriving from a search for hotels in the center would get a list of hotels in the center. So instead of an archive, we put in a redirect to this explanation.

The money side looks like this, and it needs to be stated precisely. The share of oil and gas revenue in Russia's budget fell to roughly 22 percent in 2025 and 2026, while the share of non-oil-and-gas revenue rose to roughly 78 percent (Centre for Eastern Studies OSW, 09.12.2025). The hotel business pays VAT and profit tax, meaning it feeds exactly the second category. The argument that "vacation money goes to oil" is wrong; the argument that "a guest's spending ends up in the budget of an aggressor state" is right.

The promise that stopped holding

Let's start with the simplest element of a hotel list: payment. Visa and Mastercard announced the suspension of operations in Russia in early March 2022. As of March 10, cards issued outside the country stopped working there (The Moscow Times, 06.03.2022). Germany's Federal Foreign Office confirms this in its current travel advice and also warns there about the risk of arbitrary detention for German citizens and dual nationals (Auswärtiges Amt).

The second element is support when things go wrong. Germany's Federal Foreign Office separately notes that German missions in the Russian Federation are in principle unable to issue replacement passport documents outside working hours (Auswärtiges Amt). A hotel roundup usually stays silent about such things, because it assumes a normal backdrop. Here the backdrop is not normal.

For readers from the US, the picture is even harsher. The State Department keeps Russia at Level 4 "Do Not Travel," reissued on December 29, 2025, and separately notes that the US government's ability to help its citizens in Russia is limited: the embassy in Moscow has reduced staff, and all consulates in the country have suspended operations, including consular services (U.S. Department of State). A hotel roundup by default assumes that if something goes wrong, there is somewhere to turn. That assumption cannot be made here.

The third element is the market itself. Organized tourism to Russia fell by roughly 90 percent already in 2022 (industry statistics overview, Fox News, 2022). A list of hotels for an audience that is barely present in that city had, by 2026, become not a reference but a monument to its own genre.

Where the line runs

We are not saying that the city can no longer be written about at all. The line is drawn not by the topic, but by the function of the text. Writing about the city's history, its architecture, or its role in European culture remains possible. A list of places to spend the night, with ratings and booking links, is already a service.

That line also runs inside our own section. The texts you are reading now explain a decision, cite documents, and name destinations we continue to write about. They do not compare offers, do not rate the quality of services, and do not steer the reader toward a transaction. That is exactly why we consider it possible to publish them, and not the old roundups.

The legal framework is built the same way. Council Regulation (EU) 2025/2033 of October 23, 2025 replaced point 2 of Article 5n of Regulation 833/2014 with a direct ban on providing services directly related to tourism activities in Russia (EUR-Lex). The list of covered services includes travel agency and tour operator services, guide services, and related advertising services, and the transition period ended on January 1, 2026 (Skadden, 11.2025). The ban also covers online platforms that allow booking and selling tickets (Fieldfisher).

What this means for you as a reader in the EU and the US

Item

Status 09/2026

Source

Services related to tourism in Russia

Prohibited by Article 5n(2) of Regulation 833/2014 as amended by Regulation 2025/2033

EUR-Lex

Transition period

Ended 01.01.2026

Skadden, 11.2025

Online booking

Covered by the ban on the same basis as agency services

Fieldfisher

Payment with an EU card

Impossible since 10.03.2022

The Moscow Times

Replacing a lost passport

German missions do not issue passport replacement documents outside working hours

Auswärtiges Amt

German Federal Foreign Office advisory

"Vor Reisen in die Russische Föderation wird gewarnt"

Auswärtiges Amt

US State Department advisory

Level 4: Do Not Travel, reissued 12.29.2025

travel.state.gov

Where to go instead

The request was about a beautiful historic center, a decent hotel with breakfast, and a short trip. The live sections of the site answer that: Finland with Helsinki, Poland with Gdansk and Warsaw, Czechia with Prague, Germany with Berlin, as well as Austria and Hungary. The Baltic direction is closest in spirit to what readers were looking for when they opened the deleted texts.

The editorial team's overall explanation for the entire section is collected in the section hub. Related topics: our position on routes and excursions and our position on parks and family outings.

Where we stand

We believe that a hotel roundup is an advertising genre regardless of whether it contains affiliate links. In our assessment, publishing such material about a country waging a war against a neighboring state means helping sell it as an ordinary travel destination. We decided to remove all five roundups and not publish "updated" versions.

We also do not list the removed properties. A named hotel in an explanatory text still reads as a recommendation.

We write about the state and its policies, not about people based on their passport. In Russia, there are those who spoke out against the war and received prison sentences for it. Our decision not to publish guides to Russia is about money, sanctions, and reader safety, not nationality.

⁉️🤔 Frequently asked questions

What if someone is going anyway, isn't honest information more useful than silence?

We are not silent: we publish the legal framework and official warnings, and that is the information we can provide responsibly. There are no practical tips about traveling there in this section's texts, by a deliberate editorial decision.

Why do you call the hotel list advertising?

Because it serves an advertising function: it compares offers and nudges toward a choice. Analyses of the 19th sanctions package classify travel agency, tour operator, and guide services, as well as related advertising services, as prohibited, and our previous format is closer to that list than to a neutral description of the city.

Was the wedding selection also deleted?

Yes, along with the rest. The type of trip changes neither the legal framework nor the problems with paying by card.

Will you bring these lists back?

We make no promises with dates. The decision will be revisited when the grounds for it, listed in the sources block, change.

Why do you write about this city at all if you removed the materials?

Because we do not erase the city from history and do not pretend the reader never asked about it. We removed the commercial format and kept the explanation. Those are different things, and we described the difference above.

In short

Five hotel selections for Saint Petersburg have been removed in full. EU law prohibits services related to tourism in Russia and their advertising. Paying for accommodation there with a foreign card is impossible. The German Foreign Office and the US State Department warn against travel. The Baltic and Central European cities we continue to cover are listed above.

How you can help

We do not collect money and receive nothing from the links below. These are official websites of organizations working with the consequences of the war:

Sources

Link check date: 09.03.2026.

Publication date: September 3, 2026. Last updated: September 3, 2026.

tourism.com.de Editorial Team
tourism.com.de Editorial TeamTravel editorial team: research, fact-checking, updates→ All publications

A small editorial team writing guides for independent travel. We travel ourselves, but we haven’t been everywhere, so we check prices, opening hours and how to get there against official sources.