With the tourist season now underway and the first waves of visitors arriving at the Northern Black Sea resorts, employers are once again facing a familiar and worsening challenge - securing enough workers, BNR reports. Despite years of discussion about staffing shortages in the tourism industry, the bureaucratic process of bringing in foreign workers remains slow, complicated, and too often yields unpredictable outcomes.

At the Albena resort complex, preparations for the summer began months ago, well before the season started. Tatyana Dzhilyanova, head of HR at the resort, said they had no choice but to rely on foreign labor.

“The Bulgarian market can’t meet our staffing needs - not just in tourism but overall,” she explained to the Bulgarian National Radio. “We’ve submitted applications for around 800 workers to the Employment Agency and Migration Directorate. These are for both C visas - short-term, up to 90 days - and D visas, for employment lasting over three months.”

The real bottleneck, she noted, is not in the applications themselves, but in the issuance of visas abroad. Workers from countries like Indonesia and Uzbekistan are already approved on paper, but until they physically receive their visas, they can’t travel. And with June 20 approaching - a key date just ahead of the peak season - any delays could cause serious disruptions.

While the Albena resort reports no rejections among its hundreds of applications, the situation is starkly different for smaller employers. Stanislav Dimitrov, who runs a hotel in the village of Kranevo, has had every single one of his applications rejected. Despite submitting correct documentation for 15 Bangladeshi workers currently employed in Dubai, the approvals never came. “They were supposed to be here by May 19,” he said. “To this day, it’s only been rejections - and no explanation why.”

Another hotelier, Viktor Luchiyanov from Balchik, says he has had more success with workers from Ukraine and Moldova, where the procedures are more streamlined. But even he has run into issues. “We’ve spent two years trying to hire people from Thailand,” he said. “The institutional barriers are absurd.”

At the core of the problem lies an overwhelmed system. Thousands of seasonal visa applications pile up each summer, yet Bulgaria’s consulates abroad don’t have the capacity to process them in time. Without reinforcement, delays are inevitable.

The biggest unanswered question is why the system seems to work for some and not for others. While some employers manage to get all their workers approved, others face blanket rejections despite submitting what they believe to be complete and accurate paperwork. One thing, however, is common across the board: the process is slow, burdensome, and offers little in the way of transparency or certainty.