Stayed here 4 days on business. Hotel is modern and very comfortable. Food is excellent.
A mix up by the hotel meant that there was no car to meet me at the airport (Schermetavo), but hotel apologized and sent a bottle of wind to my room.
The cost of a car from airport to hotel is 3,300 Ru, but you can hire a taxi at the airport for 2,500 Ru or less - I just agreed to the first figure said because I'd wasted a lot of time filling in forms for my luggage, which KLM had left in Amsterdam. The moral here is not to arrive at -1C in Moscow in a T shirt.
A cheaper way to get to the airport once you are comfortable in Moscow metro, is to walk 10 minutes from the hotel to the nearby Metro station, take a 7 min ride to Bellaruski Metro station, exist the Metro and walk 2-3 minutes down street to the Train station and get on the Aeroport express. this runs every 30 min except between 1am and 5am. Cost this way is 28Ru for Metro and 320Ru for Train - about 10% of costs of a taxi.
Also and this is a serious warning, Traffic in Moscow is only second to Istanbul. Traffic jams at 10pm are common. Hotel advised allowing 2hrs for the journey by car which is 30km - by train it's about 45 minutes all in. If you are in a more centrally located Moscow hotel you need to use the train and metro.
Kremlin and Red Square easy to get to and plenty to see. Ticket shop is about 0.75km from the Armory, and ticket for Armory doesn't allow access to other areas of Kremlin, So if you arrive early at the Armory you won't have time to go back to get another ticket. However I met an Italian tourist in the same predicament and we spent the rest of the day going around Moscow - each could take photos of the other so that we had plenty of photos that we appeared in ourselves.
Had good meal at Il Forno near the Bolshoi - in fact it was simple seared tuna with tomato and spinach, but the best I ever had anywhere in world. Interesting fact is that if you say 'non-smoking' table they put you on your own in the basement, but if you change your mind and say 'smoking' you get a good table in the centre of the restaurant.
Also gatecrashed some Russian TV music show at My Sweet Home bar, near the Lubyanka. Very good music and very stylish models attending and being interviewed by the TV crew. Found this place by accident when I decided to walk back to the hotel from the Kremlin.
Incidentally there are underpasses to facilitate road crossings - use them! - cars travel fast, are very aggressive, and do not expect pedestrians to cross the road.
KLM losing my baggage was the only downside as this meant that I lost most of the first day in Moscow, as I literally had no clothes to go out in. Carrying a spare set of clothes on the lane is the way to go. Incidentally it's nearly impossible to contact KLM by phone about your lost luggage - one no I got for Moscow KLM had all options leading to a Fax machine. The strategy is to wear the passenger down so that they give up on complaining - all passengers form Ireland and Manchester had no luggage when they arrived in Moscow, so the queues to fill up lost luggage forms in triplicate were large!
PS Very good idea to learn the Cyrillic script so you can read Metro signs more easily. Most foreign words are written as they sound but in cyrillic script, so Pectopah actually sounds like Restaurant - which it is!
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
