Burgas Airport

Burgas Airport is Bulgaria's second-busiest airport and the primary summer gateway to the country's southern Black Sea coast — the stretch of shoreline built around Sunny Beach, Nessebar, Sozopol, and Pomorie that absorbs the majority of Bulgaria's inbound beach tourism. Traffic is intensely seasonal: during July and August the airport handles more weekly movements than Sofia, and during the winter it shrinks to a near-dormant regional facility. That seasonality is the defining commercial fact of BOJ and explains its 84-route, 54-destination network skewed toward charter and low-cost operators from the UK, Germany, Poland, the Nordics, and Central Europe. The airport sits about 10 km northeast of Burgas city on the plain behind the Atanasovsko Lake salt pans, a Ramsar-designated wetland that imposes a single-runway layout. The 3,200 m (10,499 ft) concrete runway can accommodate widebody charters, although narrowbodies dominate; TUI, Ryanair, Wizz Air, SunExpress, Corendon, and Condor are among the most active scheduled carriers. Fraport acquired the 35-year concession for Burgas and Varna in 2012, and a modernized single terminal replaced the Soviet-era building in 2013. Burgas is strategically the only major airport within easy reach of the southern Bulgarian coast — Varna, 130 km north, serves the northern resorts around Golden Sands and Albena, and no other airport on the coast offers scheduled European services. BOJ moved roughly 3.0M passengers in 2023, of which more than 95% flew on international routes, a proportion matched by very few European airports of comparable size.