Bulgaria: Albena holiday village celebrates 55th birthday with 11,000 tourists

Albena Resort, Aug 26 (BTA/GNA) – The Albena Holiday Village celebrated its 55th birthday on August 24 with 11,000 tourists, most of them from the Scandinavian countries, Operations Director Marinela Tsaneva told BTA’s corespondent in Dobrich, Pavlina Zhivkova. She added that all of the resort’s hotels which opened for the summer season will stay open as there is 100% occupancy throughout the complex.

There are as many Bulgarian and Romanian tourists as last year, while tourist numbers from Scandinavian countries, France, Czechia and Poland have increased, Tsaneva said. Overall, there are more tourists than in 2023, the pace of work is back to normal and the tourist flow is reaching pre-pandemic levels.

The holiday village now has some 2,100 employees, of whom one in three is a foreigner, including people from Nepal, Bali, Indonesia, two kitchen teams from Turkiye and workers from Kyrgyzstan.

Marinela Tsaneva said that renovations are planned for the next season in various parts of the complex. The 3-star Boryana Hotel will be completely renovated and will be upgrade to four stars. The investment in it will come not only from Albena AD, but also from Germany’s Der Touristik. Design work is currently underway for the resort’s iconic Dobrudja Hotel, as well as for the Arabella Hotel, which will be the resort’s next 5-star hotel.

Albena is generally a quiet resort and tourists prefer the beachfront hotels of a higher category, as they are faster to fill up, said Tsaneva.

“Albena’s 5-star hotels will host various events throughout the year, including many sports and congress events, which start after the high season. The SPA centre is open year round,” Tsaneva said.

The new summer season for Albena will start in April 2025, when eight hotels will welcome Austrian pensioners. They will be returning after a break of several years and will stay for five weeks.

From August, the Albena Holiday Village is participating in travel fairs in Germany and will go to trade shows in other countries as well.

Tsaneva said more than 4,000 people watched violinist Vasko Vassilev’s concert at the birthday party of the holiday village. The resort’s confectioners made eight cakes that spelled out “Albena 55” and were offered to the guests. Famous ice cream makers also had treats for the guests.

On August 24, the birthday of the Albena Holiday Village, the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) held the closing conference of its Europe in the Balkans: a Common Future project, which was attended by representatives of Turkiye, the Republic of North Macedonia, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. Also on Saturday, BTA staged a presentation of the July issue of its LIK magazine, “55 Years of Our Albena in Our Hearts”, dedicated to the Albena Resort, at the Amelia Hotel.

GNA/BTA