Accommodation takes only a quarter of what a visitor spends here

Across the second quarter of 2026, visitors to Georgia spent ₾3,006.5 million in total, and the split was: food and drink ₾819.7 million, or 27.3%; shopping ₾757.4 million, 25.2%; accommodation ₾731.7 million, 24.3%; leisure, culture and sport ₾318.0 million, 10.6%; local transport ₾311.0 million, 10.3%; and everything else ₾68.7 million, 2.3%. Per visit, that works out at ₾524.1 on food and drink, ₾484.2 on shopping, ₾467.8 on the room, ₾203.3 on things to do, ₾198.8 on getting around and ₾43.9 on the rest.

The room is the third-largest line in a visitor's spending, not the first. Two things follow. First, the easiest revenue a small accommodation business can add is not a higher nightly rate but a share of the categories above it: breakfast and an evening meal, a bottle of local wine on the table, a shop corner selling what guests were going to buy anyway. Second, a destination's earnings per visitor rise faster through food, shops and things to do than through bed prices — so a neighbourhood with good restaurants and a market within walking distance supports a higher room rate than its star rating alone would suggest.

Leisure, culture and sport took ₾203.3 per visit — barely two fifths of what the same visitor spent on food. That is the gap in the table, and it is the one a private-experience host can work in. A cooking afternoon, a vineyard walk, a guided hike, a workshop with a craftsperson: these compete not against hotels but against an unspent ₾200 line. Local transport sat at a similar ₾198.8, which is why bundling the getting-there into the price of the experience tends to convert better than selling the activity alone.

These are April to June figures, so they describe spring rather than peak summer, and the shares will shift with the season — shopping is a city habit, accommodation weighs more where people stay several nights. Total expenditure in the quarter was 13.3% lower than a year earlier, so the shares sit on a smaller base. And 93.1% of visits were reported as satisfied or very satisfied, which is a good number to hold on to but not one to build a price on: satisfaction surveys ask about the experience, not about willingness to pay more for it.