How to pack for a Bulgaria Air flight

Bulgaria Air includes a 10 kg cabin bag of 55 x 40 x 23 cm on every Economy fare, plus a personal item of 40 x 30 x 15 cm under the seat. Ten kilograms is one of the more generous cabin allowances of any carrier flying from Sofia.

Compare that with a low-cost fare properly. On Ryanair the same shape of trolley is a purchase, sold only inside Priority and 2 Cabin Bags at €12.49 to €36 per person per one-way flight. For two people on a return that is four charges before anything goes in the hold.

So a Bulgaria Air fare that looks €30 dearer on a comparison page can be the cheaper trip once the trolley is counted. That is the whole reason to read a fare rather than a price.

Business Class takes two cabin pieces at 15 kg combined, plus the personal item, to a total of 17 kg.

Bulgaria Air publishes no separate weight for the personal item. It caps the pair instead: in Economy, the cabin bag and the personal item together may not exceed 12 kg.

That is a different constraint from the one most travellers pack to. If the trolley already weighs 10 kg, the laptop bag beside it has 2 kg of headroom, which a laptop and a charger will use on their own.

The practical move is to decide the split before you pack. Either carry a lighter trolley and put the weight in the personal item, or keep the personal item down to a book and a phone and let the trolley take the 10 kg.

On a Business Class ticket the combined figure is 17 kg across two cabin pieces plus the personal item, so the same arithmetic applies with more room.

Both are the published rule. Bulgaria Air does not publish how it enforces them at the gate.

Bulgaria Air's own fare conditions state it plainly: Economy Light carries no free bag allowance at all. Hand baggage only.

It is also the most locked-down ticket the airline sells. The date cannot be changed. Cancellation and refund are not permitted. And it is excluded from the loyalty and co-branded card exceptions that give other fares a free second bag.

So Economy Light is a good fare and a bad surprise, depending entirely on whether you knew. If your trip fits in the 10 kg cabin bag, it is the correct purchase and the airline has still given you more cabin space than a low-cost fare would.

If your trip does not fit, Economy Light plus a hold bag is a specific arithmetic question rather than an obvious answer, and the next sections give you the numbers to settle it.

Four Economy fares, and only the cabin allowance is the same across all of them.

Economy Light includes no checked bag. Economy Saver includes one piece up to 23 kg, with a date change permitted for €70 and no cancellation. Economy Flex includes the same single 23 kg piece, with free date changes and cancellation permitted at a charge.

Read that last pair again. Saver and Flex carry identical luggage. The step up buys flexibility, not baggage, which is the opposite of what the names suggest to most people.

Economy Youth is the most generous, with two pieces at up to 23 kg each, but it carries age conditions the baggage page does not spell out and it will not appear in an ordinary fare search. Do not plan around it unless you have seen it offered to you.

Business Essential and Business Executive both carry two pieces at up to 32 kg.

Bulgaria Air is the outlier among the carriers flying from Sofia, in a good way. Its bag prices are a fixed published table rather than a live calculator result, so you can know the exact number before you book anything.

On an international route, the first checked bag of up to 23 kg and 158 cm is €50 prepaid and €70 at the airport. Those are one-way figures, per passenger.

On a domestic route the same bag is €30 prepaid and €50 at the airport.

Prepaid means bought online during booking, through Manage Booking afterwards, at a Bulgaria Air office or through an agency. The window closes three hours before scheduled departure, after which only the airport price applies.

Waiting therefore costs a known €20 per bag per direction, about 40 per cent. That is one of the few penalties in this whole pillar you can state as a single number.

Two bags is not double the price of one. The published international table steps up sharply.

The first bag is €50 prepaid and €70 at the airport. The second is €70 prepaid and €100 at the airport. The third is €120 prepaid and €150 at the airport. Overweight between 23 and 32 kg carries its own higher price, €100 at the airport.

So two prepaid bags on a one-way international flight is €120, and on a return that is €240 before anyone has weighed anything.

That is the point at which a fare family with a bag included stops being an upsell and starts being the cheaper ticket. Two travellers each taking one 23 kg bag pay €200 prepaid for a return on Economy Light. Priced against Saver or Flex, the fare difference rarely gets close to that.

Count the bags first, then pick the fare.

Work out how many hold bags the trip needs, then compare like this.

No hold bag: buy Economy Light. You still get the 10 kg cabin bag and the personal item, and you pay for nothing you will not use.

One hold bag: Economy Light plus a prepaid bag costs €100 more than the bare fare for a return, per person. If Economy Saver is priced within €100 of Economy Light, Saver is the better buy, and it comes with a paid date change option that Light does not have at any price.

Two hold bags for one person: Light plus two prepaid bags is €240 on a return. At that point Saver plus one extra prepaid bag is usually cheaper, because the fare covers one piece and the extra one is charged at the €70 second-bag rate each way.

Flexibility is a separate question. Buy Flex when you expect the date to move, not for the luggage, because the bag is the same one.

One Bulgaria Air route has different cabin rules, and it is the kind of detail that only bites at the gate.

Flights FB1451 and FB1452, on the Riga to Sofia route, are operated by Air Baltic on Bulgaria Air's behalf. The cabin bag there is 55 x 40 x 20 cm at 8 kg rather than the usual 55 x 40 x 23 cm at 10 kg.

That is 2 kg and 3 cm less than the fare you thought you bought. A bag packed to Bulgaria Air's standard allowance can be over the limit on its own flight number.

Two smaller notes from the same table. Fares originating in London, Zurich or Tel Aviv are quoted in pounds, francs and dollars rather than euros, which does not affect a Sofia departure but does affect a one-way home. And the published fee table applies to Sofia, Varna, Burgas, Plovdiv and Bucharest departures alike.

It is easy to assume a Bulgarian flag carrier publishes its small print only in Bulgarian, and to reach for a comparison site instead. That assumption is wrong and it costs accuracy.

Bulgaria Air's fare family conditions and its full baggage fee table are published in English on air.bg, with exact euro figures, on both the Bulgarian and English versions of the site. Every figure above can be checked there in a couple of minutes.

That matters more than it sounds, because the other carriers flying these routes are not like this. Turkish Airlines, Aegean and flydubai all push you to a calculator or a booking flow instead of publishing a number, so any figure quoted for them elsewhere is an estimate.

When you can read the real table, read it. It is the difference between knowing the cost of your trip and approximating it.