Abanotubani rates 4.3 from 1,084 reviews — and the complaint is almost always the booking, not the bath

Abanotubani carries 4.3 out of 5 across 1,084 Tripadvisor reviews and sits first among the 91 spas listed for Tbilisi. That is a high placing on a large sample, which is worth more than a perfect five from forty people. The district itself — the brick domes, the gorge behind it, the waterfall at the end of the lane — is free to walk through; the rating covers the whole area, not one bathhouse.

Reviewers describe communal baths in the range of 10 to 70 lari an hour, and private rooms with their own sauna or pool from roughly 120 lari up to 500 for the grander ones. The extras are where people are caught out: a sheet, the scrubbing mitt, tea and the customary tip for the therapist are each charged separately and each is small, but they add up on a bill you were not expecting to itemise. Prices differ bathhouse to bathhouse, so treat these as the shape of the market rather than a quoted rate.

The negative reviews cluster in one place and it is not the water. Private rooms are frequently fully booked, phones go unanswered, and people who walked in expecting a free slot were turned away. A smaller group mentions cleanliness in the communal areas and inconsistent service from one house to the next. None of it is about the baths being disappointing — it is about arriving without a plan.

Book the private room a day or two ahead, especially at a weekend, and ask when you book what the sheet, the mitt and the scrub will cost so the total is settled before you undress. If you only want to look, the walk through the district and up the gorge to the waterfall takes about an hour and costs nothing. Hosts letting flats in the old town can save themselves a recurring guest complaint by making the booking call on the guest's behalf.