58,000 Bulgarians celebrate Easter in Greece. This is what he said in the show “This Morning” on bTV the director of the Institute for analyzes and evaluations in tourism Assoc. Rumen Draganov.
„There are 62,000 accommodation places in Greece. There is no way to say that the hotels there are mostly booked by Bulgarians for the holidays. To have some idea of what scales we are talking about – in Bulgaria, there are 17,000 accommodation places, he explained.
The Director of the Institute for Analyzes and Evaluations in Tourism, however, admitted that the main customers of a part of the hotels in Northern Greece are the Bulgarians. According to him, our compatriots prefer to celebrate Easter there, because the Greeks, like us, are Eastern Orthodox and their church services are extremely solemn.
„We say that a total of about one million travel on holidays. 170,000 of them will be those who chose to travel abroad, as 58,000 of them – in Greece. We don't count them one by one at the "Tower" checkpoint, but we get this data based on cognitive analysis, he added.
Assoc. Rumen Draganov also pointed out that “the biggest flow of traveling Bulgarians is to Turkey, but the reason there is not this tourism practiced in Greece”. According to him, our compatriots travel to Turkey for the purpose of shopping and he gave the example of Edirne.
It is also curious that if there are about 1.2 million Bulgarians traveling to Greece annually, there are also the same number of Greeks visiting Bulgaria during this period. “For trips to Turkey, the numbers are higher because the trips are more intense,” he explained.
Assoc. Rumen Draganov also pointed out that annually in our country there are 24 million trips by Bulgarians inside the country and 7 million Bulgarians who prefer trips abroad.
„In principle, our domestic tourism is significantly more developed and this applies to all countries, not only Bulgaria”, he explained.
The data he gave also show that we have “a total of 4.2 million traveling Bulgarians, who during these 52 weeks go somewhere on average six times”.
„In Greece, small hotels and taverns are preferred, i.e. the family business. While in Turkey, an all-inclusive is being sought. The concept in Turkey is different from that in Greece – their hotels are large and they are moved outside the populated areas. The Turks studied the Bulgarian experience in tourism – what are we doing in Golden Sands, Albena and Sunny Beach, after which they started building such outsourced complexes, he added.
The director of the Institute for Analyzes and Evaluations in Tourism also pointed out that Turkey is slightly more expensive than Bulgaria in all-inclusive, citing data from an English survey.
„We have given this example many times – in Bulgaria, dinner for two is BGN 89 with a bottle of wine, while in Turkey the price is around BGN 94. In Greece, it is double – for the same dinner, 160 BGN is paid, he explained.
According to him, during the whole of May, around 800,000 foreign tourists will enter our country. He also pointed out that trips are becoming more intense in both directions – Bulgarians travel abroad, and foreign tourists come to our country.