site.btaAnother 400 Bulgarian Tourists Will Return on Two Flights from Dubai on Saturday and Sunday

Around 400 more Bulgarian tourists will return from the Middle East on two flights from Dubai – one on Saturday night and another on Sunday morning, Tourism Minister Irena Georgieva, said on Darik Radio. “We are preparing a flight for tonight, which has a smaller capacity, but there is also another plane scheduled for tomorrow morning,” she said.

According to her, so far six evacuation flights have been carried out, bringing back over 1,300 Bulgarian citizens from the Middle East following the outbreak of the conflict there. There are also tourists who returned from Jordan, who are not included in this number because they travelled overland to Egypt and then used regular flights from there.

“The number of tourists and the lists provided by the tour operators are very dynamic because tourists find other ways to leave the country,” Georgieva noted. She added that there are also regular flights available.

Georgieva said that the task force continues to receive information about individual travellers. who wish to return, so the process will continue. Tour operators are preparing a specialized flight to bring back tourists from the capital of the Maldives, Male, as well as from Sri Lanka and Thailand. The Ministry of Tourism has no information about Bulgarian citizens currently in Israel or Iran, but the task force may have registered Bulgarians from these countries, the minister explained.

She advised tour operators and tourists to monitor the risk index, which appears on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

According to her, the greatest challenges over the past week have been managing panic, as well as determining the exact number of people who want to return to Bulgaria.