Bulgaria Revises Down Tourism Spending Data, Doubts Remain

A technical flop has been blamed for the unrealistically high tourism spending figures of Bulgarians last year, which the country provided to the EU statistical office.

This has emerged after the Bulgarian statistical office and Eurostat  jointly checked figures, according to which a Bulgarian national spent an average EUR 2100 on holiday trips and tourism in 2011.

According to the newly published data the sum totals EUR 779, still way ahead of neighboring Romanians (EUR 162).

The initially released statistics prompted journalists to raise additional questions about the way the data has been collected.

On Monday it turned out to be the fault not of the local institute methodology, as initially thought, but a technical mistake which encompassed all types of trips, including immigrant's travels and students going abroad for training.

Bulgaria's national statistics institute has assured that its work is fully compliant with the requirements of the European Union and Eurostat.

But even after the data was revised downwards, suspicions remains that the figures are unrealistically high for a country, which has been dealt a heavy blow by the global crisis and whose people receive the lowest wages in the EU.

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