Georgia added rooms faster than it added hotels in 2025, and the new ones are bigger

Establishments rose 4.5%, rooms 6.1% and total floor area 9.8%, to just under four million square metres. Read together, that is a market in which each new entrant is larger than the average of what already exists. It is the difference between a year of guesthouses opening and a year of hotels opening, and it changes what a prospective owner is competing against. If you are letting apartments or running a small guesthouse, the supply arriving next door is increasingly a building with a reception desk, a restaurant and a booking engine behind it rather than another flat like yours.

Guests reached 6.2 million, up 6.5%, against rooms up 6.1%. Those two figures moving together is worth noticing, because it means the extra demand was largely absorbed by the extra capacity rather than filling the rooms that already existed. Demand growing and supply growing at the same rate is a stable picture, not a tightening one, and it is the opposite of the situation in which rates rise. For anyone modelling a new project on the assumption that arrivals will push occupancy up, this is the number that argues for caution: the arrivals arrived, and the beds arrived with them.

Adjara accounts for 21.3% of establishments and Tbilisi 20.9%, which puts a fifth of the country's accommodation in the Black Sea region and another fifth in the capital. That split matters because the two markets behave differently through the year: the coast runs on a summer season, the capital on a mixture of business, transit and city breaks that spreads more evenly. An investor comparing a Batumi apartment with a Tbilisi one is not comparing two versions of the same product, and the regional shares are a reminder of how much of the national supply sits in one strongly seasonal place.

The sector employed 29,101 people in 2025, of whom 54.5% were women. Set against 54,300 rooms, that is roughly one employee for every two rooms across the whole stock, a ratio that tells you most of the inventory is lightly staffed small properties rather than full-service hotels. For an owner weighing whether to run a flat themselves or hand it to a management company, this is the context: the market is largely staffed thin, which keeps costs down and also means guests are not generally comparing your flat against hotel-standard service. It also means wage pressure, when it comes, lands on a sector with little slack in it.