A slew of tourism resort proprietors renewed calls on developers to refrain from hyper-construction and from going beyond prescribed development deadlines.

The call comes days after the construction season ending May 1 2008 began and as construction schedules both on the southern and northern coastlines rack up busy construction agendas.

Elena Ivanova, head of the Union of Slunchev Bryag Proprietors, voiced local owners' concern over plans to erect 23 new hotels. The same concern has been echoed by owners to the south and north of this location.

Owners in the village of Tsarevo, for example, are among the ones on the highest alert. The resort will as of next year have Del Croco, a luxurious crocodile-shaped villa community built by Austria's Immoeast, Spain's Buena Vista and local Vida Tour Invest. The 90 million euro project alone will add 900 apartment units. The flats have already been sold out to Russian and UK citizens.

In addition, the village will witness the construction of a 16.7-hectare complex in what will be a nine million euro investment.

The villages of Kamenar, Medovo and Alexandrovo, all near Pomorie on the southern coastline, will become the construction site for a number of rural tourism facilities.

The municipality of Pomorie itself plans to add a brand new attraction - a facility of the submarine shelf type to use up a 3km coastline. The Pomorie municipality has plans to build the project with the help of an external investor. The project will be carried out in four stages.

Calls are no less valid for the northern coastline. National Real Estate Agency data says that construction output this season should exceed last year's by 10 to 15 per cent.
Varna municipality alone has issued more than 200 construction permits but only 10 are areas in resorts.

Municipalities, however, insist that construction permits are mostly issued for non-resort sites and that measures are taken to avert a hyper-construction scenario.

Byala municipality, for example, has attuned to owners' calls by raising the fee for construction permits' issue to five leva a sq m, as did the penalties for construction violations.

Both authorities agree, however, that closed multi-purpose complexes are the fad of the season.

The bulk of the northern-coastline projects will be carried out off Byala, Riviera and Kabakum. Kabakum will be hosting a closed-type complex with a total of 200 apartment units in what will be one of the 10 projects to be deployed in the territory of northern coastal resorts.

The municipality of Byala will become the site for the largest project to be deployed on 200 000 sq m in the Kara Dere site.

The construction agenda is busy despite calls from tour operators for a tourist outflow stemming from hyper-construction. The trend has been most noticeable among families from the UK and Germany. Their complaints mainly refer to the plethora of concrete and streets full of pavilions and noise, clients of Thomas Cook tour operators were reported by Dnevnik business daily as saying. In addition, new hotels have eaten up all greenery in the area.

As earlier reported, Thomas Cook will cease to bring UK tourists to the northern coastline as of next summer season. It also predicted that the under-capacity trend to have plagued hotels as of recently would be sustained next year round. Apart from the above problems, clients complained about the poor quality of service compared to resorts in neighbouring countries and the fact that foreign tourists no longer consider Bulgaria as an "exotic" destination and, therefore, one worth visiting.