Soviet Tours Reviews 41

I went to Iraq with Soviet Tours and I couldn't be more satisfied with the service provided by this agency. Gianluca is extremely professional, deeply knowledgeable, reliable, easy going and a real problem solver. Forget about mainstream holiday packages! you will get your own customised trip based on your personal interests and needs. Cant' wait to travel again with them.

Went to Turkmenistan with a full 10 day programme, everything went super smooth, the guides weren’t just guides they were friends. And very big shoutout to Gianluca who helped me a lot!

In 2019 we got in touch with Gianlucca from Soviet Tours to organise a trip to the Caucasus. Communication was extremely easy from the very beginning, and he quickly understood exactly what we were looking for. Throughout the whole process, Gianlucca advised and supported us on all practical matters, including visas, flights, and other logistics, which gave us great peace of mind. We travelled in August 2019, and the experience exceeded all our expectations. Our guide, Abdullah, was fantastic and had an exceptional ability to engage with and respond to our many interests — from nature and literature to cultural aspects of Caucasian communities and the historical memory of the genocides that have shaped the region. Highly recommended. We’re already looking forward to more!

Wonderful experience in Moldova/PMR last summer!
The trip was finely organized in terms of schedules and places to visit. Gianluca guides you through the former USSR world with accuracy and care, with particular emphasis on art and architecture. He’ll make you fall in love with every single house of culture and knows how to deal with babushkas! Hope to travel with Soviet tours again!

Wonderful experience in Kazakistan. Drivers (Roman, Andrej and Gino) are the best to guide you into the desert, crosswise canyons, organizing camping and all the necessary to live an incredible and wild adventure (they are great chef too!).

Great organization, everything perfect!

Perfect Organisation, amazing places!

Excellent service. They set up exactly what I was looking for and catered to my interests.

I just came back from Turkmenistan. A taylor made trip organized by Soviet Tours that included many interesting sites that combined comfort, adventure and genuine towns in the coast of the Caspian Sea. The itinerary had the correct dose of Soviet and Turkmen, it wasn’t high demanding physically speaking, nor boring, as I was traveling with children. Our guide and drivers were professional,kind and available at all times. I recommend visiting Turkmenistan, thanks to Soviet Tours our trip was adapted to our budget, interests and time.

We travelled to Romania and Bulgaria with Soviet Tours. We found it a very enjoyable and fun experience. Soviet Tours have unique on the ground knowledge, providing access to sights and experiences that would otherwise be unobtainable. Soviet Tours are a great travel partner to consider if you are interested in travelling down the path less visited. Recommended.

We had a great trip through Slovakia with our guide, Marek. His knowledge of, and pride in, his country took us to many extra places on a well designed itinerary.

I took two wonderful summertime tours (the Baltics Tour and Moldova/Transnistria tour) with Soviet Tours over the past couple of years, including one guided and led by Gianluca himself! I have lived and travelled all across the former Soviet Union for many years; however, I didn’t have any connections in these two places and figured that I would let Soviet Tours do the planning – and I’m so happy that I did!

Gianluca is an industry expert and veteran, with a wide base of knowledge on a variety of topics. I really appreciated that he and his tour guides treated all guests the same – thoroughly explaining everything and telling such interesting stories. I liked that the tours brought a wide array of travelers together – from those who have only been outside of their home country several times to well-travelled adventurers.

Gianluca is very responsive to all queries beforehand and I commend him for making it very easy to pay for the tours for travelers from the United States via credit card. He is easy to work with, taking care at creating a great travel group dynamic on his tours! An amazing experience all-around, and I can’t recommend Soviet Tours enough!

Gianluca created a very thoughtful and well planned tour of Moldova and Transnistria! The guides he selected for us were excellent and we were able to see and experience things we never would have been able to without these guides. Highly recommend, worth the money!

I joined a tour through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with Soviet Tours in April 2025, and it was a truly positive experience. The trip was well organized, with a great balance between guided activities, cultural insights, and free time.
One of the most fascinating aspects was the itinerary itself, which took us off the typical tourist routes and allowed us to discover more authentic and lesser-known places. The local guides were qualified, passionate, and approachable, enriching each stop with meaningful stories and context.
What made the journey even more special was the opportunity to connect with local people—through conversations, visits to everyday settings, and spontaneous encounters that offered real insight into the culture of the countries we visited and how they relate to their Soviet past. The coordinator, with her experience and approach, had a crucial role in making the experience unique.
It was a rich and thoughtfully designed trip, led by a team that clearly cares deeply about what they do. I returned home with plenty to reflect on and a newfound appreciation for this fascinating region of the world.

My partner and I decided to join a guided tour to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with Soviet Tours last April. The experience was great! Trip coordinator was very experienced and passionate providing us very helpful insights and notions to understand the countries we visited. The tour was very well planned and we found such a great group we really enjoyed the experience from the first day till the last! We also came back home with a better understanding of what passed through centuries in central Asia and what the Soviet period meant to them and the heritage they are still experiencing. We can only thank Soviet Tours passionate and competent team if we could achieve such understanding!

Top notch service, very responsive and knowledgeable.

An epic trip across the North Caucasus executed to perfection thanks to curated unique in-depth cultural experiences and the constant attention of one of the greatest guides I had the pleasure to meet during my gallivanting around the globe. Soviet Tours' pre-tour and on-tour assistance was unparalleled if compared to all my previous experiences with other tour operators, but the real gem was Abdullah, a guide, a companion, and now a friend.

Had a wonderful trip through Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia with Soviet tours.
Focus was on Yugoslav era modernist architecture and the many monuments (spomenik) that commemorate the fight against nazi occupation during ww2.
The tour was expertly led by Donald Niebyl - who's behind the Spomenik database and local guides Marco and Ninoslav.

Someone once said that all the great evils of the world ended in "-isms". That includes communism, fascism... and tourism. As a rule of thumb, this may well be true, but Soviet Tours is the exception to it. These are the few, precious travel experiences still on sale, that enrich one's soul.
I came across Soviet Tours through one of its partner independent travel agencies in Italy, with which I travelled to Sakartvelo (Georgia). That was a profound, heart-warming and eye-opening experience that left me yearning for more. And so, I signed up for a tour of Moldova and Pridnestrovie with Gianluca.
At barely 40 years old, Gianluca is a polyglot and an outstanding professional, and may well know more about the Soviet world than many university professors combined, yet he is approachable, unassuming, and so generous in dishing out pearls of Soviet wisdom, often off the top of his head. I would go as far as saying that Gianluca stands to tourism in foreign countries as Richard Feynman stands to physics: there probably were greater geniuses than him, but only he could weave the loose strands of the subject matter in a coherent, compelling and understandable story.
And that is really what it boils down to: you would be wasting your money travelling to former soviet countries without a knowledgeable guide that is able to put everything in historical and emotional context. That is what Gianluca & his partners (just as good!) do, and it is a truckload of added value.
I suppose the clientele of Soviet Tours self-selects somewhat too: your travel companions will likely be people with interesting stories (not the social media kind!) to tell, and with whom you could likely build deeper connections.
I cannot recommend Soviet Tours & its partner agencies enough. In an ideal world - a Soviet one, of course - today's entire private tourism industry would be dismantled and replaced with a state monopoly. I'd put Gianluca & his colleagues in charge XD !

Well organised private tour with all bureaucracy papers and visa procedures cleared and transparent to me, zero bad surprise during three weeks around Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, not the most easy (specially the first one!) destinations. Our Local guides were also fundamental to have actual inside of the countries. Very suggested travel company in the former Soviet Union republics.