Editorial

Enter the Robots

In case you missed it and you probably did; local Premium Taxi operator Volt has announced that it intends to have autonomous taxis on the streets of Sofia by 2028. In lay speak, this means they plan to have driverless cars in service by then. The plan is to have initially 50 of the cars in operation before rising shortly afterwards to 200. The cars themselves are to be supplied by the American company Tensor. Before that to happen however there are a number of hoops that need to be navigated before such a launch will be possible.

Firstly, there is, as yet, no clear European directive regarding autonomous driving though one is in the pipeline. Equally, local considerations will need to be considered and local laws changed or re-engineered. Whilst one can see the European directives being relatively straight forward, anything that reverts to local decision making suddenly becomes vulnerable to the lobbying of local politicians and business interests; the power of the potentially impacted party may still hold sway over the decision making process, as is the case not just in Bulgaria but also in other Eastern European countries.

Such transportation is already on the cusp of being rolled out across several European cities with testing currently taking place in locations such as Munich and Zagreb which will be followed by testing in Madrid, London and Zurich. Sofia plans to be in the subsequent wave. Such taxis are already found in the USA but Europe throws up some different challenges with many of the cities having narrow streets and heavier and more concentrated traffic. It’s not just the streets of central Sofia where such technology will be challenged but hopefully by 2028, the testing and pain points will be ironed out and challenging city environments will no longer be such a sticking point. The business interests of the incumbent taxi companies however may well remain the more significant challenge.

What also comes into play regarding the technology is that there is still, as yet, no European provider of such vehicles nor the software and hardware that accompanies them. The choice currently is between American and Chinese providers and the geopolitical issues ramping up around the globe would suggest that the American providers will be the “go to” solution; though not necessarily so.

So, are we likely to see the demise or reduction of the local yellow cabs that have provided the capital with what is generally good and inexpensive connectivity for the past decades? Probably not just yet as also no doubt any new player on the market will also come with a premium price: one assumes. That said, the taxi service Volt in Sofia is a relatively new player on the local market and despite its fares being slightly higher than the traditional yellow cabs, they seem to have found a niche market that is growing by the week. It might be though that the clock is already ticking where taxi users will no longer smell the fragrance of Eau de Tobacco in their vehicle, nor the sounds of heavy rock at 4am on the way to the airport for an early morning flight or even the family discussions the driver has on his mobile as he unerringly turns the steering wheel effortlessly with one hand as he overtakes a line of cars at breakneck speed in the inside line. They may well be missed: for others perhaps not.

Mark Thomas

When the Bell Tolls

Bulgaria’s summer season seems to have created a most definite trend: revenue up, visitors down. The July numbers echoes those from June with July showing revenues increased by 11.4% but visitors were down 3%. An almost mirror image of the previous month.

What is also significant is that the number of overseas visitors is down by 5.4% whilst tourism visits from domestic sources was down 0.3%. The actual total revenue totalled 346.4 million Euro of which 237.9m came from overseas visitors.

The alarm bells are ringing already and they could become significantly louder next year. Short term profiteering or the perception that such is the case will lead to significant fall out down the line. Changing the philosophy of here and now might have to take place the hard way.

Early Start

The number of commercial flights in the EU continues to rise and is almost back to the pre-covid 2019 levels. In 2025, 6.9 million commercial flights took place, a rise of 3.8% on the previous year. Non-Scheduled flights i.e., charter flights etc, made up 8.5% of all flights with August having the largest number of flights with a total of 693,046.

For 2027, Bulgaria is pushing to increase the seat capacity for flights to the Black Sea with both new co-operations with airlines and increased capacity with established partners. The German market is being given particular attention as this historically important source market has felt somewhat neglected in recent years.

Also playing a part of this planned increase is the Eurovision Song Contect with extra flights being scheduled from across Europe into Bourgas allied to bringing the start date of existing connections forward to meet the expected demand for the event.

Baltic Struggle

Latvia based airline airBaltic has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the USA. The move is designed to allow it to re-structure its financial position whilst continuing its operations as normal.

Indeed, the message from the airline is that operations will carry on as normal with its flight operations and there will be no impact for travellers. Scandinavian carrier SAS followed a similar process in 2024.

Meanwhile, air Baltic says it has already secured 500m Euro’s in financing which will help it move forward with its plans. Lenders might not be so risk averse if some of the of the airlines fleet of 54 aircraft are used as guarantees for finance: assuming they are actually owned by the airline as opposed to leased.

Lufthansa may be one potential long-term suitor as it was rumoured, they were sniffing around airBaltic a short while ago, maybe in a similar way they stalked Italian carrier ITA before swopping in for the kill. Lufthansa also has a close tie in already with Air Baltic as it wet leases up to 21 A220 planes and crew from them for the summer season, a relationship that has been in existence since 2019.

The Changing Face

The ever-changing Sofia Airport has launched a new hi-tech baggage handling system in Terminal 2. The press release says that the new system is designed not just to improve the baggage handling process here and now, but also as it strives to serve up to 20 million passengers in the near future.

Just for reference the footfall in 2025 was around 8,5 million, so just where the extra 11.5 million will come from is an interesting topic of discussion.

The new system allows eight times more bags to be checked per hour with an increased capacity from 400 to 3200 bags per hour. What is interesting about this is the fact that in an average hour one would expect a modest 6 -8 flights per hour to be departing from Terminal 2 and if each plane has roughly 175 passengers per plane, that’s somewhere between 1050 – 1400 passengers per hour. One thus assumes that only a small fraction has been, or are currently taking suitcases with them otherwise the system would have collapsed long ago; perhaps it did!

Another change that travellers will see in Terminal 2 aside of the already revamped Duty Free shopping and expensive food and drinks, is that the actual check in desks are being moved so that they are perpendicular to the entrance. Over 50 of these newly located desks will be available once the change is complete.

Question: why wasn’t the airport designed and managed properly in the first place? It was only opened in December 2006 so its hardly ancient and best practice design and management was available (if required) 20 years ago. The key expression being ‘if required’.

The EES Saga Continues

The EU’s EES and ETIAS continues to wreak havoc as well as contradictory sentiment regarding how well it is or is not working. The EES (Entry/Exit System) became fully operational in April 2026 but many countries were given band width to suspend its use if peak season queues got too large at passport control; which they invariably did. The EES – in theory – requires the capture of biometric data from non-EU citizens entering the EU. This is a one-off process, again in theory, but you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to calculate how long this may take for a full plane load of passengers who have not already been through the process. Additionally, the ‘”one off”’ process seems not to be understood as non-EU travellers comment they are forced to provide this time and time again each time they enter the EU! This is not always universal but the take home comment would appear to be that each EU country seems to do whatever it wants whenever it wants. The travel fraternity is asking the EU to allow flexibility in the use of the EES so that passengers are not left in three-hour queues due to technical inadequacies.

Meanwhile, part two of the project, the EITAS which in real language is a revenue generating visa for anyone that’s not an EU citizen which was due to start several years ago and which was more latterly slated to start in the final quarter of this year, looks like it will finally make an appearance sometime in 2027, though don’t hold your breath.

The Mega Winner

There are various measures that can be adopted to define the biggest or busiest airport globally; airport size, passenger capacity, numbers of flights etc can all be claimed to be the most significant depending on the narrative. One other measure is the “most connected” and this refers to the number of different destinations that can be flown to from a single airport and for 2026 there is a new top dog: Istanbul.

For 2026, 336 destinations were served from Istanbul’s new airport and it replaced London Heathrow in top spot. Heathrow being impacted by its connectivity to Middle Eastern destinations due to the ongoing spat in the region. Istanbul also opened a 4^th runway on September 18^th to add to the existing 3 main runways.

The Top 10 Global Airports for International Connectivity: –

1. Istanbul
2. London Heathrow
3. Amsterdam
4. Kuala Lumpur
5. Chicago
6. Seoul
7. Frankfurt
8. Tokyo Haneda
9. Paris CDG
10. Atlanta

What is interesting about this “Megahubs” analysis run by the prominent OAG aviation data firm is the position of the revered mega hubs in the Middle East. Scheduled capacity in this region has fallen by some 5.7% with the airports in Dubai and Doha slipping in ranking to the 31^st and 46th position, down from 15^th and 34^th the year before. The ranking being measured by taking the number of scheduled connections at each of the worlds top 100 airports and calculating the possible connections between inbound and outbound flights within a 6 hour window.

When the Sun Shines

August 2026 was the fourth warmest August since 1930 and it was also the driest since 1988 according to Bulgaria’s National Meteorological Bureau. The highest temperature was recorded at 40.5C near Pleven on the 21^st of the month whilst the highest in Sofia was 35.6C recorded on the 21^st. The amount of rain was only 44% of the norm with 24.4 mm.

Aside of the data, the fact that three out of the four hottest Augusts have been in the past 16 years; in 2010, 2024 and this year, shows that the summers are getting hotter and hotter, with the flip side being that whilst this year was relatively dry and certainly much drier than usual, the side effect of thunder storms and flash flooding can mean surges in river levels which can also threaten lives.

From a tourism perspective, the country may well be mirroring the climate fluctuations in other European countries and especially in the Southern Mediterranean beach resorts. If this is the case, does this also provide an opportunity for an extended summer season – the current one being one of the shortest in the beach resort market – which will help the financials enormously both of entrepreneurs and the government. Extending the summer season where the weather is invariably more reliable at the end of the summer than it is at the start, similar to the ski season, means a shift in the mind set of everyone in the tourism chain; from operators and hotels through to the punters who spend their money. Changing the habits of a lifetime is not easy, but if Bulgaria misses the opportunity to extend what it already has, other countries resorts might not be so remiss in filling the gap.

The Loss Leader Gains Momentum

For anyone studying the generic subject of “Business Studies” to give it its old adage, the concept of a “’loss leader’” is neither a new one nor is it difficult to understand: you sell something at a loss in the hope that other items will be sold as a result which will generate an overall profit: simple. So, how about the modern-day case study of the airline business; they sell seats at a loss so they can make a profit. No matter how you read it, it makes no sense, unless that is you dig deep into the industry and how it has transformed over the past couple of decades.

In 2025, 58 of the world’s major airlines who feature in research on an annual basis (hence apples are compared with apples) reported that their ancillary income ie. Revenue generated from any other source other than the selling of a seat e.g., Seat assignments, priority boarding, the carrying of bags etc., outpaced revenue growth by a factor of two to one. In numbers, the ancillary income grew by 13.2 billion USD (increased by), itself a 13.4% increase whereas the revenue increase from selling a seat increased by a ‘” mere” 7.2%. of the 58 airlines, 30 of them gathered more than 1 billion USD in income from ancillary fees.

Just as an example of how these numbers sit with an airline, United Airlines were the biggest winners in ancillary income with a total of 11.6 billion USD in income from ancillaries. This represented a 19.5% increase year on year meaning they earn 58.25 USD per passenger extra on top of the actual sale of the ticket.

Turkish

We have often written about the upward trajectory of Turkish Airlines and from a purely local perspective, they have created a new wave of local travel demand for destinations to the “’east’” that were not so long ago, both difficult to access and also expensive if it were possible. Turkish themselves operate to more countries than any other carrier and their new flights to Melbourne and Sydney are proving very successful with around 85% occupancy. These flights stop for refuelling enroute in Singapore though this will become direct when Turkish get their new super long-range Airbus A350 – 1000 series next year. In this context the two Aussie cities may soon be joined by another two as flights to both Perth and Brisbane are being talked about.

Turkish has the operational rights to operate up to a whopping 35 services weekly to Australia and currently uses just 8 of these options; 5 to Sydney and 3 to Melbourne. Thus there is massive scope to set up flights to these two other cities.

The success of their flights so far has perhaps being aided in no small way by the circus of events in the Middle East, with a connection via Istanbul being viewed as a much safer option than via one of the traditional gulf hubs. What is also interesting is to look at the destinations (or origins depending how you view it) of the passengers that fly from Australia and they paint an interesting picture.

The most popular destinations for those travelling from Sydney are London, Skopie, Rome, Belgrade and Paris whilst from Melbourne its London, Rome, Belgrade, Paris, Ohrid(!) and Dublin. The importance of the traffic to/from the Balkans is thus significant and perhaps the diaspora from the Western Balkans is more significant than many may have realised. The dynamics of the markets for Brisbane and Perth though may be rather different as migrants over the past century have tended to veer towards Sydney and Melbourne. Thus the two potentially new destinations may need to have more of a leisure focus attached to them.

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