Another summer season is starting for the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Last year, seaside resorts saw that holidaymakers from traditional Bulgarian-coast loving countries like Germany starting to drop in number, unhappy with the noise and dirt caused by the excessive and seemingly incessant construction along the seacoast.

Time for Travel spoke to Antoaneta Koleva, general manager of Business Hotel Varna, one of the all-season hotels in Bulgaria’s sea capital Varna. In her words, the situation does not look bright, even now when the new summer season is yet to enter its most heated period.

“Unfortunately my colleagues’ and my expectations for the new season are not very high. If we speak about mass seaside tourism, our statistics and the figures for already-booked beds show a serious drop in numbers compared to 2005 - up to 20 per cent for UK tourists and more than 25 per cent for the Germans,” Koleva said.

However, she has more hope for what she calls “city tourism”, especially when it comes to Varna, where a steady increase in the number of foreign visitors has been observed in the past several years.

“We have also witnessed an expansion in different groups of tourists by nationality, age, visit goal and so on. This can be explained by the development of the local, as well as the country’s, economy, by the cultural and social life of the city, by Bulgaria’s further accession to different international organisations, including the EU, and by the influx of more foreign investment,” she said.

Similar to many other people involved in the tourism industry, Koleva spoke of the threat caused by excessive construction. Because of this, in recent years seaside resorts have traded in some of their natural beauty for concrete, losing their appeal to foreign holidaymakers.

“The season, which used to start in early May, now starts at the end of May or in early June, because of many unfinished large-scale construction projects. This is an absolutely negative trend for our summer season, which is anyhow limited in time because of the climatic characteristics of our Black Sea coast and is now further shortened thanks to the human factors,” Koleva said.

According to her, this shows a lack of foresight and negligence towards her colleagues’ and her efforts to apply a professional approach to enlarging the season within the April-October period.

As a result of the negative trends, some specialists say that the quality of foreign tourists is dropping as well. Most recent statements by tourism analysts point out that the reduced appeal is also lowering prices, which only brings poorer tourists, something that can hardly bring much benefit to the sector and the Bulgarian state. Koleva, however, does not completely share this negative opinion.

“My observations of tourists visiting Varna show that the quality of the tourists is not changing in such a negative direction. In fact, we can talk about a diversification in terms of the visitors’ goals and even in their quality. This can be explained with the development of the region and the necessity this development creates for the presence of different kinds of people with different education, financial capabilities, cultural interests and so on. We can say that now we have more foreign specialists and consultants coming to work on different projects, and we have more actors, musicians, singers and movie producers that come to Varna to take part or just watch movie, theatre and dance festivals. The (festivals) are becoming more and more popular abroad, and they’re certain to have a larger foreign audience in the coming years,” Koleva said.