Visitor numbers fell 5% in the second quarter — but spending per trip fell nearly twice as fast

Arrivals in the second quarter of 2026 came to roughly 1.3 million, down 5.2% year on year. Spending by foreign visitors came to 3.0 billion lari, down 13.3%. Average spending per visit fell 9.2% to 1,922.1 lari. Read together they say something sharper than a soft quarter: fewer people came, and the ones who came spent less each. A 5% drop in footfall can be absorbed with discounting; a near-10% drop in what each visitor spends cannot, because discounting is part of what causes it.

Russia remained the single largest source with 328,900 visitors, a quarter of the total at 25.1%. Turkey accounted for 16.9% and Armenia for 10.8%. Three neighbours and near-neighbours therefore supplied more than half of all arrivals, which is the structural fact behind the spending figure: much of this traffic is short, repeat, overland and price-sensitive, and it responds quickly to exchange rates and to the cost of getting here. Operators building a business on long-haul, longer-staying guests are working against the grain of the current mix, not with it.

If average spend per visit is falling while arrivals hold roughly flat, revenue per guest is the lever, not occupancy. In practice that means pricing the extras separately rather than bundling them into a lower headline rate, and making the second and third day of a stay worth buying — a transfer, a tasting, a guided walk — instead of competing on the nightly rate alone. It also argues for watching the first-half picture rather than one quarter: the Asian Development Bank put the fall in tourism revenue across the whole first half of 2026 at 2.0%, a much gentler number than the second quarter alone suggests, and it attributed the softness partly to disrupted regional air travel rather than to demand for Georgia itself.