According to the latest data of the Hellenic Statistical Authority, Bulgarians made 1.5 million visits to Greece in 2014, which is an increase of 121.8 % compared to the previous year.

This double increase in the number of trips made Bulgarians the third largest group of tourists visiting Greece after the Germans and the English.

These figures are radically different from the data of the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute (NSI), which estimated that the number of Bulgarian visits to Greece were in half – 867 000.

NSI similarly found that Bulgarians made more travels to Greece in 2014, but the increase was less than 5 % on an annual basis, which considerably differed from the Greek data.

According to the Hellenic Statistical Authority, the Bulgarians were the group of tourists that registered the greatest increase in absolute terms, followed by the Romanians.

The Bulgarians represented a 7 % share of all tourists visiting Greece, compared to 3.9 % in 2013.

The road transport was the most preferred means of Bulgarians traveling to Greece, as it had been used in 1.4 million of the trips.

Back in the beginning of 2014, the Greek associations in the tourism sector announced that a record number of Bulgarian tourists was expected, Capital daily reminds.

One of the reasons for this was the opening of the new border checkpoint at Makaza in the autumn of 2013.

It had been anticipated that the new checkpoint would lead to an increased number of travels from southern Bulgaria to the Greek resorts, including on one-day and weekend holidays.

Another probable reason for the growth of Bulgarian visits to Greece was the cooler summer in Bulgaria in 2014.

These statistics follow the recent call of Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who asked Bulgarians to spend the Easter holiday in their country rather than going abroad.