Most visitors to Georgia drive in from the countries next door

Why most visitors reach Georgia by road

The Georgian National Tourism Administration counted 7,803,239 international traveller trips into Georgia in 2025, 5.9% more than in 2024, using border records from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Its definitions decide what each figure means. A traveller is anybody crossing in. A visitor is a traveller aged 15 or older on a trip of under a year who is not coming to work for a Georgian employer, and 6,856,809 of the 2025 trips, 87.9%, met that test. A tourist is a visitor who stays at least one night, and there were 5,521,866 of those in 2025, 80.5% of all visitor visits.

Most of those visits came overland. In 2025, 3,951,850 visitor visits, or 57.6%, crossed a land border, 2,854,412 came through an airport, and railway and sea crossings together carried 0.7%. The land share had been 61.5% in 2024, so flying is gaining, but slowly.

Where a visitor lives decides how the visitor comes. Only 20.1% of visits from neighbouring states in 2025 arrived by air, against 64.8% of visits from every other country. The neighbours also stay for shorter periods: 70.6% of their visits included a night in Georgia, against 95.1% for everyone else. Visits from the four neighbours added up to 4,069,036 in 2025, 1,579,764 from Russia, 1,248,881 from Türkiye, 948,242 from Armenia and 292,149 from Azerbaijan, which is 59.3% of the total. That share is edging down; in the first quarter of 2025 it stood at 59.8%, from 61.6% a year earlier.

The totals are still short of the level before the pandemic. GNTA recorded 9,357,964 traveller trips in 2019 and 1,747,110 in 2020, and the 2025 figure of 7,803,239 sits between the two. Receipts recovered sooner. The National Bank of Georgia put revenue from international travel at 4,690,180,153 US dollars in 2025, 6% above 2024, against about 3.27 billion in 2019, a level it had passed by 2022. Georgia: economy follows that money and where it comes from.

How the Sarpi crossing feeds Batumi

Sarpi is a Laz village on the Black Sea at the Turkish border, about 12 km south of Batumi and about 20 km north-east of the Turkish town of Hopa. The road through it handled 1,212,743 visits in 2025, 30.7% of all land arrivals into Georgia, and in the first quarter of 2025 it handled 197,239, a share of 29.9%. Part of the traffic is business: Turkish companies working in Batumi send their people across by road, and Batumi's casinos draw visitors from Türkiye, where casino gambling is illegal.

Batumi is both a seaside resort and a cargo port, which Azerbaijan uses as a transit point for energy deliveries to Europe. The coast of Adjara runs for 57 km, and the climate along it is subtropical and wet: Batumi receives about 2,500 mm of rain a year, and the coastal lowlands average about 5 °C in midwinter and 22 °C in midsummer.

The hotel figures show how much of Georgia's visitor year happens in this one city. STR Global measured occupancy in Georgia's branded hotels at 73.6% in Batumi across 2025, against 59.8% in Tbilisi and 54.3% for the rest of the country. In the first quarter of 2025 Batumi still led at 59.9%, but Tbilisi was at 39.5% and the rest of Georgia at 35.3%. In August 2017 Adjara held 12,126 registered beds, 18.5% of the national total.

The village also has its own calendar. The Laz festival of Kolkhoba is held in the village each year at the end of August or the start of September, and the myth of the Argonauts is performed on a stage there.

Where visitors flying into Georgia land

Georgia has four international airports, and GNTA divides air arrivals among three of them. Of the 2,854,412 visitor visits that arrived by air in 2025, 65.4% came through Tbilisi International Airport, 18.3% through Batumi and 16.3% through Kutaisi. The split moves with the season. In the first quarter of 2025, with the beach closed, Tbilisi took 69.2%, Kutaisi 17.8% and Batumi 13.1%.

Air is how the growth markets arrive. Visits from Israel reached 402,426 in 2025, up 29.4%; visits from China rose 44.4% to 127,895; and India sent 142,476. The European Union and the United Kingdom together sent 499,890 visits, 14% more than in 2024, and visits from Spain rose 48.6% and from the United Kingdom 39.1%. The same dependence cuts the other way. In the first quarter of 2025 visits from Poland fell 13.4% and from Germany 7.2%, and GNTA attributed most of the drop to fewer flights between those countries and Georgia.

Tbilisi is where most flying visitors start. The capital lies in eastern Georgia, partly in a gorge of the Kura River, and had 1,331,485 inhabitants on 14 November 2024. Kutaisi, in the west, was for a period the seat of the Georgian kings, and the Gelati Monastery stands at its edge.

Wikipedia gives 21,110 km of roads and 1,576 km of railway in Georgia, excluding the occupied territories. The state-owned Georgian Railway runs the passenger trains, and the Baku to Tbilisi to Kars line, which opened on 30 October 2017, connects the Caucasus to Türkiye on standard gauge. Scheduled and chartered ferries link Georgian ports with Bulgaria, Romania, Türkiye and Ukraine.

Where the Georgian Military Road crosses the Caucasus

What the road passes on the way south

The other road in runs from the north. The Georgian Military Road covers 212 km between Vladikavkaz in Russia and Tbilisi. From Vladikavkaz it climbs the valley of the Terek and passes through the Darial Gorge, which marks the border. On the Georgian side it runs past Mount Kazbek and the Gergeti Trinity Church, through the region of Khevi, and up to the Jvari Pass, where it reaches 2,379 metres. After the pass it follows the Tetri Aragvi River down through Mtiuleti to Pasanauri, runs below the walls of the fortress of Ananuri, and meets the main east to west highway, the E60, just north of Mtskheta.

The height of Kazbek itself is given differently by the sources on file. Wikipedia gives 5,047 metres; Britannica gives 16,512 feet, about 5,033 metres. Both describe it as a volcano, and it is the only peak of volcanic origin among the high summits Wikipedia lists for Georgia.

Kazbegi National Park lies along this stretch. In 2016, 310,477 foreign visitors and 424,397 Georgian citizens entered the protected areas of Georgia, Kazbegi among them, along with Prometheus Cave and the Sataplia Managed Reserve in the west.

How the border on the road opened and closed

Strabo and Pliny the Elder both mention the route. Russian troops first marched it in 1769, the road in its present form was begun by the Russian military in 1799, and the commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, Aleksey Yermolov, announced it finished in 1817, though work continued until 1863. By 1914 Baedeker's guide to Russia recorded motor omnibuses running between 15 April and 15 October and completing the trip in ten hours.

Russia closed its side of the crossing in 2006 and reopened it in 2013 after Armenian demands, and since then the road has carried mainly lorries between Armenia and Russia. By 2013 a Russian border official told Interfax that about three million people had passed through the Kazbegi to Verkhni Lars checkpoint. Queues of lorries built up on the Georgian side, and a new Georgian customs and parking facility at Kazbegi eased them. The other main road north across the range, through the Roki Tunnel between Shida Kartli and North Ossetia, leads into South Ossetia, which Tbilisi does not govern.

Visits from Russia rose by 157,841 in 2025, an increase of 11.1%, to 1,579,764. In 2022, when Russians began moving to Georgia after the invasion of Ukraine, they were allowed, like many other foreigners, to stay a year without a visa.

Which Georgian sites UNESCO has inscribed

Georgia succeeded to the World Heritage Convention on 4 November 1992, and four of its properties are on the list.

Two of the four sit on the routes already described. Mtskheta stands where the Georgian Military Road meets the E60, and Gelati is at Kutaisi. Mtskheta was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger on 28 June 2009 and removed on 13 July 2016, and UNESCO's most recent state of conservation report on it is dated 2026.

Upper Svaneti lies high in the north-west. Its centre, Mestia, stands at 1,441 metres, and its medieval fortifications are the reason for the inscription. Georgia's Third National Communication to the UNFCCC in 2015 found that 95% of Upper Svaneti is under some degree of avalanche threat, and the injury rate in Mestia runs three to four times the national average because of natural hazards and the risks of some mountain sports.

A further fourteen Georgian sites have been on the Tentative List since 2007, among them the Tbilisi Historic District, the cave town of Uplistsikhe, Vardzia and Khertvisi, the David Gareji monasteries, Ananuri, Mta-Tusheti and Shatili. The government counts more than 12,000 historical and cultural monuments in Georgia and more than 2,000 mineral springs, and 103 resorts in different climatic zones.

How the Georgian seasons move visitors around

The year is lopsided. The first quarter of 2025 brought 1,314,828 traveller trips, 16.8% of the year's total, and branded hotel occupancy across Georgia in that quarter was 39%, against 56.3% for 2025 as a whole.

Distance from the Black Sea and altitude set the climate. The western lowlands take between 1,000 and 2,000 mm of rain a year, and palms and citrus grow there. The plains of eastern Georgia, shielded by mountains, are drier and more continental, with summers averaging 20 to 24 °C, winters 2 to 4 °C and 500 to 800 mm of rain. Alpine conditions begin at about 2,100 metres, and above 3,600 metres snow and ice lie all year.

That makes two holiday seasons in different places. Summer belongs to the coast and the high valleys, and winter to the ski resorts at Bakuriani and Gudauri. Both have already had shorter winters with less snow, according to the UNEP and GRID-Arendal outlook on the South Caucasus mountains. The same study, drawing on Georgia's 2015 assessment of its tourism sector, found that weather in Adjara had become more favourable for visitors over the previous fifty years and projected that conditions on the coast would worsen by 2050. It expected Kakheti to become more comfortable from October to March and the mountains to take more summer visitors as lowland summers grow hotter. At Mestia the average temperature rose by 0.3 °C between 1961 to 1985 and 1986 to 2010, and winters there became about 30% wetter.

Where visitors to Georgia cannot go

Georgia's coastline runs about 315 km, and about 200 km of it belongs to Abkhazia. Neither Abkhazia nor South Ossetia is governed from Tbilisi. Georgia considers both to be territories occupied by Russia. Russia recognised both as independent states on 26 August 2008, and Georgia broke off diplomatic relations with Russia the same day. This catalogue records both positions and takes neither.

The practical consequences for a visitor are recorded by third parties. Freedom House reported in 2025 that there are ongoing restrictions on travel to and from the two territories. Since October 2008 the European Union Monitoring Mission has patrolled the administrative boundary lines of both, and in December 2021 it had 220 monitors from 26 member states. The Georgian road and rail totals quoted above exclude the two territories. Georgia: history sets out how the two lines came to be drawn, and Georgia: geography what they cut off.

Where visitors to Georgia sleep and eat

Short-term rental has grown faster than the hotels. In March 2025 GNTA counted 9,036 Georgian listings on Airbnb with more than 20,000 beds; by December 2025 there were 15,420 with more than 30,000 beds, and their average occupancy for 2025 was 60.6%. The last full register of formal accommodation on file, from August 2017, listed 1,945 units with 65,656 beds, 17,796 of them in Tbilisi. Hotels held 41,123 of those beds and family hotels 11,374.

Georgian dishes are tied to regions. Khinkali, meat dumplings, come from the eastern mountains, and khachapuri mainly from Imereti, Samegrelo and Adjara. The feast called supra is run by a toastmaster, the tamada, and is a way of meeting friends and family as much as a meal. Wine is part of every such table: in 2019 Georgia had 20 protected appellations, among them Tsinandali, Mukuzani and Khvanchkara. Georgia: culture covers the qvevri, the buried clay vessel of traditional Georgian winemaking.

What Georgia asks of visitors at the border

Since 1 January 2026 foreign visitors to Georgia must hold medical travel insurance for their whole stay, with a minimum coverage of 30,000 lari, under Government Decree No. 602 adopted on 26 December 2025. The proof is checked at land and air crossings alongside the passport. Diplomats, the citizens of some treaty states and air passengers in transit who do not pass through passport control are exempt.

The currency is the Georgian lari, written GEL or ₾. Mains power is 220 volts at 50 hertz on Europlug and Schuko sockets, so continental European plugs fit without an adapter. The telephone country code is +995. Georgia keeps one time zone, four hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time, and does not move the clocks in summer. Traffic drives on the right, and Georgian cars carry the international code GE.