About the project
Bulgaria Guidebook is an independent travel publisher’s guide to Bulgaria, written for people planning a trip from abroad: the Black Sea coast, Sofia and Plovdiv, the Rila and Pirin mountains, the ski resorts and the roads between them. It runs in English and Russian and holds over 120 guides: city pages, attractions, transport, trip planning, ready-made routes, food, insurance and car rental.
The site has been publishing since July 2026. Every guide carries the date it was last checked, and every price, timetable and distance in it can be traced to the page of the company that sells the ticket or sets the rule. How that works is below.
How topics are chosen
A topic gets written because travelers search for it before a trip, not because we had a spare afternoon: how to get from Sofia Airport into the city, whether Bansko or Borovets suits a first ski week, what a rental car on the coast costs in August. We look at what people ask in search and pick the questions where a good answer saves real time or money.
Where a guide is about a place - a restaurant in the food directory, a monastery, a beach - it goes in only when it is rated well across several independent sources. One glowing review with silence everywhere else is not a consensus. We don’t reprint other platforms’ scores or review counts; their rules forbid it, and a rating is a filter at the door, not the article.
How every number is checked
Every price, timetable, distance and date in a guide has a passport: the number, the operator’s page it came from, and the day we compared the two. The operator is whoever sells the ticket, runs the lift or sets the rule. For this site that is most often the BDZ train timetable at razpisanie.bdz.bg, Burgas bus station at burgasbus.info, the Bansko lifts at banskoski.com, the toll and vignette system at bgtoll.bg and the Rila Monastery at rilskimanastir.org.
Before a guide is published, an automated check reads the numbers in its title, description, tables and opening paragraphs and requires an operator’s page from the guide’s source list behind each one. If a number has no such page, the build fails and the guide does not go out. Aggregators, booking sites and other people’s blogs don’t count as a source for a number, however plausible they look.
Photos and sources
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Under every picture you will find the author, the licence and a link to the original file, so you can check the frame and reuse it on the same terms.
Behind each guide sits the list of pages it was built from, kept with the guide and rechecked when the guide is. The pages that carry numbers are the operators’ own. We prefer a Bulgarian-language timetable or a municipal page over a polished English summary of it, because the summary is where numbers go stale.
How the guide is made
Research and first drafts are done with AI tools; an editor sets the brief, directs the work, checks the result against the sources and decides what gets published. The check date printed on each guide is the day of that review, and guides are revisited by season, because prices, timetables and opening hours in Bulgaria drift.
Bulgaria Guidebook is one of twelve country guides run by the same publisher on one editorial system, with the same rules for numbers, photos and dates. The project is run by A. Kobtsev, whose name is in the footer of every page.
How the project is funded
Some links on the site are affiliate links: car rental, accommodation, tours, insurance, connectivity. If you follow such a link and book something, we get a small commission from the service. The price for you stays the same - and the project exists and is updated on these funds.
Partnership doesn’t affect selection: a topic or a place gets into the guide because travelers need it and the facts check out, not because a service has an affiliate program. If it’s better or more honest to recommend an option without an affiliate link, we recommend it.