Bulgarian Hotel Owners to Fight Alcohol Tourism by Blacklisting Tour Operators

Hotel owners in Bulgarian Black Sea resorts will try to fight alcohol tourism by blacklisting tour operators. Photo by BGNES

Associations of hotel owners in Bulgarian Black Sea resorts have set about compiling a blacklist of tour operators bringing holidaymakers to Bulgaria on alcohol tourism.

The database of discredited tour operators, which will be prevented from signing contracts with local hotel owners for the 2012 summer season, already includes a number of small scale companies from Scandinavia, Great Britain and Germany, according to Stoyan Marinov, member of the board of the Varna Tourism Chamber.

Veselin Nalbantov, member of the managing board of the Bulgarian Hotel and Restaurant Association (BHRA), told journalists from Bulgarian 24 Hours daily that BHRA was also in the process of creating a similar list.

To prove his point, Marinov explained that Turkey had managed to get rid of alcohol tourism by denying bookings to blacklisted tour operators.

The BHRA executive said that hotel owners along the Black Sea coast were already warning travel agencies that alcohol tourists would not be welcome.

"Pub crawls, as the drinking sprees organized by tour operators are called, are against the law", Nalbantov added, specifying that many of the bars receiving the tourist groups had no classification and the groups themselves contained people below the legal drinking age.

The blacklist initiative was announced one week after hoteliers in Sunny Beach called for the introduction of a curfew.

Their call was backed by major tour operators, including local representatives of Thomas Cook and TUI.

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