Bulgaria

Bulgaria occupies a small piece of the Balkan Peninsula sharing common borders with Romania (north), Serbia (west), the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (southwest), Greece (south), and Turkey (southeast) and direct sea links with Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia through the Black Sea. As a former socialist country, Bulgaria was a popular destination mainly for the former Eastern Bloc countries before 1989, attracting leisure and recreational visitors. Since the democratic changes in the early 1990s, the country is a well-known mass tourism destination with a particular focus on summer holidays, ski tourism, and low-cost trips. Increasingly, some alternative forms of tourism have been developed, such as spa tourism, rural tourism, and wine tourism.

Despite its growing importance, tourism in Bulgaria suffers from a wide range of economic ...