Tour operators staged a protest

Tour operators staged a protest on October 26 because of the absence of government funds for liquidity and refunds to their customers.

According to the protesters, there is an 83% drop in their turnover for the last year and a half, they are demanding urgent help from the state.

The industry explained that the aid of 70 million for the sector was voted on during the budget update, but it still cannot reach them.

30 million plus further 6 million for customers to whom money is to be returned, plus 5 million and 200 BGN to be allocated for liquidity, making a total of 41 million that they want urgently by New Year to be allocated to programmes to support the industry, otherwise they face bankruptcy.

"The main demand of today's protest is an immediate distribution of the aid voted by the National Assembly for tour operators, travel agents in general for the tourist business, to the amount of BGN 70 million plus the 5 million and 200 thousand that are left from the tour operator's programme for refunds to customers ie it is a significant amount, which we insist on, which was voted by the National Assembly, the last National Assembly, with the update of the state budget, and which we insist on being distributed to us very quickly, because there is no time to wait any longer, " said Rumyana. Baltova from “Future for Tourism” association.

"The surest way is to wait for the next National Assembly, to make a legal change in the text and then to open these programmes, but here we have a problem with the time frame, which expires on December 31 and which means that it simply will not be extended or at least for now we have only an indication as a wish for the European community, but we do not have an actual extension of the framework itself ", added Pavlina Ilieva, from “Future for Tourism”.

The Ministry of Tourism stated that these funds have been notified to the European Commission and next week they will be able to have all the documents for the distribution of these funds.