Two airports up, one sharply down: Georgia's air traffic split

Figures reported in late April from Georgia's Civil Aviation Agency put Tbilisi International at 1,099,204 passengers in the first quarter of 2026, about 8% up on the same quarter a year earlier. Kutaisi handled 386,238, roughly 7% up. Batumi carried 115,785 — down around 25.6%. Together the three airports moved just over 1.6 million passengers, a gain of a little over 4%.

Batumi is a summer airport. Its winter volumes are small enough that a handful of route decisions — a carrier pausing a service, a charter programme not repeated — can swing the percentage hard. A 25% fall on a base of roughly 115,000 passengers is a very different quantity of missing people than the same percentage would be in Tbilisi. That is a reason to read the figure carefully, not a reason to dismiss it.

Air capacity is the upstream variable for short-let occupancy on the coast. When seats into Batumi thin out, the substitute is not nothing — it is a longer transfer from Kutaisi, or a drive from Tbilisi. Owners letting in Batumi and Gonio are therefore competing partly on how easy the journey looks from the guest's side, and listings that spell out realistic transfer times from Kutaisi are answering a question the booking traveller is already asking.