Every tourist entering Georgia needs insurance of at least 30,000 lari — and most guests still arrive not knowing

From 1 January 2026, tourists entering Georgia are required to hold health and accident insurance with cover of no less than 30,000 lari. The policy must cover the entire period of stay, including both the arrival and the departure date. It may be issued by a Georgian or a foreign insurer, must be available in Georgian or English, and can be shown on paper or on a phone. Diplomatic staff, drivers working in international commercial transport and people covered by international treaties are exempt.

The notice sets out what is required but not how it is enforced. It does not describe penalties for arriving without a policy, and it does not spell out how or where documents are checked. That gap is worth reading carefully: it means a traveller should not assume the rule is unenforced, and equally that a host should not invent consequences they cannot verify. The honest advice to a guest is that the requirement exists, that it is inexpensive to satisfy, and that there is no reason to find out at a border what happens without it.

The people who lose money to this rule are rarely the tourists. They are the guesthouse with a no-show, the driver waiting at arrivals, the operator holding a non-refundable mountain booking for a group one member of which was delayed at the airport. A booking confirmation that names the requirement, the 30,000 lari minimum and the need to cover the full stay costs nothing to send and removes the most common version of that problem. For groups, the useful discipline is to collect policy details at the same time as passport numbers rather than in the week before arrival.

Thirty thousand lari is a floor, not a recommendation. Georgia's appeal sits in places where a serious problem is expensive to solve: high passes, ski slopes, unpaved mountain roads, long distances between hospitals. A guest travelling to Svaneti or Tusheti in a hired 4x4 is in a different risk category from one spending four days in Tbilisi, and the policy that satisfies the border may not be the policy that covers a helicopter. That is a conversation worth having with guests who have booked the mountains, and it is also the reason many operators ask for evidence of cover rather than a verbal assurance.