Making Your Visit to Moscow Efficient
When you plan a business visit to any location, especially a big city like Moscow (15 million residents and very spread out!) it is important to consider logistics. Simply picking the wrong location for a hotel away from the venue you’ll be frequently visiting (such as exhibition grounds or your Russian partner’s facility) may easily cost you 2-2.5 hours per day in commute and considerable money for taxi. Or if you streamline your meetings in a hectic way, you may be able to fit just two visits in a day rather than three or four. However, this problem is easy to fix!
Before planning a meeting to Moscow, here are some things to consider:
Moscow is a very spread out city and has traffic congestion, as any big megapolis does. So, it is important to pick up a hotel not far from the location you’ll be visiting. Moscow has many hotels in virtually all parts of the city and even outside its boundary, so it is easy to find the right location. However, these hotels are not always visible on the hotel booking websites, and again, it is better to ask somebody local for advice.
When you streamline your meetings throughout a day, what you see are Moscow addresses transliterated from Russian, and you just put them together in random order. However, in my experience there have been situations when the first meeting was in one part of the city, than the second one just on the other side of the city, and the third location was again close to the first one. As a result, we spent a lot of time driving back and forth whereas just reshuffling the meetings in a more logistically coherent way could have saved us a couple of hours. This is what I call streamlining your meetings wisely (if, of course, your partner’s schedule allows it). Before you map out your meetings in Moscow and Moscow Region, it is recommended to ask somebody local for advice.
Moscow has excellent public transportation system, and you may think “I just book a taxi and go there”, this approach may not be the best. What costs 1 hour in time and 20 dollars in cash above the ground would be 15 minutes and 2 dollars below the ground, i.e. going by fast, clean, safe and famously beautiful Moscow Metro (subway) that extends to all the parts of the city. Smart locals travel by metro or combination of metro plus a short taxi ride to the desired location. However, this is impossible to plan or do without the local knowledge, and this is where we can help you.