Accommodation Done: World Cup 2018 Russia

Accommodation Done: World Cup 2018 Russia

Since the last post we have nailed down our accommodation for Russia 2018, well at least I hope we have…?

As with the last World Cup in Brazil, I have been looking at AirBnB as the primary resource for accommodation in Russia, mainly because it’s more economical than hotels and apartments, and there is a better choice & selection available. The trouble with trying to book something this far out from next year’s competition, is that many owners have not considered their pricing for 2018, and the closer we get the more expensive it can become, plus there is more incentive for owners to "Bump" reservations and put their prices up. I guess this has always been a potential problem for us when booking non-hotel type accommodation, but we have just been lucky so far...

The more I thought about trying to shoe-horn in a week or 2 in Finland, or even base ourselves there for the early stages of the World Cup, the more of a logistical problem it became. With 4 games in St. Petersburg and 3 of them being evening games, meant that travelling back to Finland after the games would mean some late nights, or even having to find somewhere to stay for the evening. In the end I decided that it would be easier to get a long term rental on an apartment for almost 3 weeks in St. Petersburg and base ourselves there.

With this in mind, I started to look at splitting our time between St. Petersburg & Moscow and drew up a shortlist of suitable AirBnB accommodation for a potential group of up to 8 people in each location, and reached out to a small handful of places to see if we can get the accommodation locked down. As a backup, I also took a look at hotel type apartments that are less likely to "bump" our reservation once booked, and it allowed us the flexibility to book a different size hotel rooms to accommodate additional people that may want to join us in Russia. I shared the shortlist of about 6 potential AirBnB places with Yates and we came up with our favourites and I started the booking process.

Within a period of about 2 weeks at the end of May, I managed to book an 8 people apartment in the heart of St. Petersburg for 22 days, (7^th June to 29^th June), and a similar sized apartment in central Moscow for 20 days, (29^th June to 19^th July). Both apartments were within our proposed budget and give us flexibility in terms of accommodating various combination of potential guests during our time in Russia. Additionally, both apartments are within easy walking distance to the centre of each city, and well located for public transport for getting to the various stadiums, and I have my fingers-crossed that when the Fan-Zones are announced that we will be pretty close to those as well.  RESULT…!!

So now that the accommodation is sorted, time to starting thinking about the next hurdle to overcome, ticketing. There is still no new information coming out of FIFA about tickets, but with the Confederations Cup now underway, but I am expecting that we will get more news in the next month or so. However, we can now be a bit more specific about the 8 matches we will be targeting for tickets:

St.Petersburg & Moscow
Match	Location	Time	Teams	CAT2 $
M4	St. Petersburg	18.00	B3vB4	$       165
M17	St. Petersburg	21.00	RUSvA3	$       165
M25	St. Petersburg	15.00	E1vE3	$       165
M39	St. Petersburg	21.00	D4vD1	$       165
M51	Moscow Luzhniki	17.00	1Bv2A	$       185
M56	Moscow Spartak	21.00	1Hv2G	$       185
M62	Moscow Luzhniki	21.00	W59vW60	$       480
M64	Moscow Luzhniki	18.00	W61vW62	$       710
			Cost per person (US$)	$    2,220

If my memory is correct regarding previous World Cups, we could only buy a max of 7 sets of tickets per person, which may be a problems as we want to 8 matches. This could be further compounded by the additional identity authentication process with FAN-ID, making it significantly more risky trying to buy tickets in the name of someone not attending the matches. I have a few cunning strategies up my sleeve, but until more information is announced, there is no point in worrying about it…

In other news, as is our tradition, Fiona and I have booked our pre-World Cup Trip, where we go somewhere as part of our travel to the World Cup host country. In previous years we have indulged our love of travel and spent a couple of weeks in Tunisia, Namibia, and Chile, all of which have a decidedly ‘desert’ ambiance to them. So in order to continue the theme, for 2018 we are going to head to Alice Springs in mid-May, and spend 2 weeks driving an RV to Sydney through the ‘Red Centre’, stopping off to see Uluru and some other sights on the way. This is an adventure that Fiona and I have always wanted and now is as good a time as any..!  On the way back from the World Cup this time, our plan is to first head to Barcelona for a week to celebrate Fiona’s 50^th Birthday, and then stop off somewhere in either Asia or South America, depending on which way round the world our flights take, on our way back to Christchurch.

As you can imagine, excitement is beginning to build.