Hotels in Irkutsk

The city's historic core fits onto four streets — Karl Marx, Lenin, Sukhe-Bator and Dekabrskikh Sobytiy — and from here you can walk to Gagarin Boulevard and the Angara embankment as well as to Kirov Square with the Church of the Savior. That location pays off if you are staying in Irkutsk for more than a single night and want to see the city rather than just sleep before the drive to Baikal. The best-known hotels in Irkutsk stand here too, including those whose windows face the river.

The 130th Quarter is Irkutskaya Sloboda, a pedestrian district of reconstructed 19th-century wooden buildings opened for the city's 350th anniversary, and every visitor makes it here. The hotels stand at the entrance to the sloboda on the Jerusalem Hill side and along Sedova and Lapina streets, so the quarter's restaurants are about three minutes away and the Angara embankment roughly ten. A good option for a short trip, when you want to cover the whole city on foot and not deal with transport.

Wooden Irkutsk survives outside the 130th Quarter too: Podgornaya, Timiryazeva and Gryaznova streets still hold real merchant estates and tenement houses, some of them converted into small hotels. These buildings have only a handful of rooms and an intimate feel, and the center and the sloboda are a ten- to fifteen-minute walk away. Take one if you want to sleep inside Irkutsk's architecture instead of walking past it with a camera.

Irkutsk has few small upscale hotels, and almost all of them are gathered in the historic core — on Karl Marx, Lenin and 3 Iyulya streets and closer to the Tsesovskaya embankment. They have their own spas and restaurants, which you appreciate most in winter, when you come back off the Baikal ice and want to warm up. A logical choice if Irkutsk is part of the journey in its own right for you and not a stopover before Listvyanka.

The airport sits inside the city limits, and transfers to Listvyanka and Olkhon leave early in the morning, so a night on Shiryamova or Sovetskaya saves you an hour of sleep and a drive across the whole of Irkutsk. Right by the terminal you can reach the entrance on foot in a minute, while a little further along Sovetskaya it is quieter, without the noise of the terminal area. Just keep in mind that the city runs on UTC+8: when you arrange a transfer, check the time locally rather than by Moscow time — the driver will come for seven in the morning Irkutsk time.

You can economize in Irkutsk without moving out to the edge of town: the Pravoberezhny district, fifteen minutes' walk from the embankment, has both hostels and small hotels with private rooms. That makes sense when you need the city only for a night before an early departure to Olkhon and are saving your money for the Baikal part of the trip. What sets these places apart from the central hotels is not the distance but the room size and the range of services — a shower and a bed you get everywhere.

There are more daily rental apartments in Irkutsk than hotel rooms, and a noticeable share of them sit right in the center: on Marata, Sverdlova and Rossiyskaya streets and in Gershevicha Lane, a couple of blocks from the Angara embankment. A kitchen and a washing machine help when you come back from Baikal soaked through, or when you arrive as a group and don't want to eat out every evening. Check-in is usually self-service with a door code, which is convenient for night arrivals — and the Irkutsk airport schedule has plenty of those.

The left bank is the Sverdlovsky and Leninsky districts around Irkutsk-Passazhirsky station, and it is worth staying here in two cases: you are traveling the Trans-Siberian and moving on in the morning, or you need INRTU and the aircraft plant. The hotels on Tereshkovoy, Rumyantseva and Profsoyuznaya streets are a few minutes from the platform, but getting to the 130th Quarter and the Church of the Savior means crossing the Glazkovsky Bridge. For a standard sightseeing plan that is an extra trip across town; for transit it is the most convenient solution.

Listvyanka is about seventy kilometers from Irkutsk along the Baikal Highway — an hour to an hour and a half on the road — and some travelers decide not to spend a night in the city at all. Along the highway and in the village itself there are holiday resorts and hotels with banyas, a few minutes' walk from the water. It makes sense if you land during the day and want to wake up on Baikal already, leaving Irkutsk for the way back.