Mestia and Telavi are each getting a terminal for about 50,000 passengers a year — and a two-year build to go with it

These are tenders for construction, not openings. United Airports of Georgia announced the procurement in late August 2026; for Mestia, bids were taken between 25 and 30 September, with an estimated tender value of 15,047,634 lari and a requirement to complete within 24 months of contract signing, including the acceptance certificate. Telavi's stated construction period is 21 months. Design work on the Mestia terminal, by Green Studio, cost 390,000 lari. Each building is planned to serve about 50,000 passengers a year. Worth holding on to: a government presentation in June had described a Telavi airport and a Mestia terminal as launching in October, which on this timetable means starting rather than finishing.

Fifty thousand passengers a year is roughly 140 a day — a terminal sized for a handful of small aircraft, not for charter traffic. That is the right read on what these projects are: they improve the experience of a route that already exists in a thin form, rather than opening Svaneti and Kakheti to volume tourism. For comparison, the same government presentation put total Georgian airport throughput at a record 8.5 million passengers across 82 airlines and 125 active routes. Mestia and Telavi together, at full design capacity, would be a little over 1% of that. Anyone modelling guesthouse demand in Mestia on the back of a new terminal should size the effect accordingly.

The Mestia terminal was originally expected to be finished in 2025, and was delayed for reasons that were not published. That history is the main thing to weigh before treating a 24-month construction window as a date. Mountain work has its own constraints — the building season in Svaneti is short, access over the pass is seasonal, and a winter can take months out of a programme. So the honest expectation for Mestia is a new terminal somewhere in 2028 or 2029 if the contract is signed promptly and the schedule holds, with the usual risk that it does not. Telavi, lower and easier to reach, has the shorter stated period and the better odds of landing near it.

Two practical points. First, the construction itself is the near-term event: an airport site under works for two years is noise, traffic and contractors needing beds, and that is a demand pattern different from tourism. Second, a terminal does not create flights. What a scheduled route into Mestia or Telavi depends on is an airline deciding the numbers work, and nothing in the tender guarantees that. If you are a guesthouse or a winery weighing an investment on this basis, the sequence to watch is contract signed, then construction progress, then an airline publishing a schedule — and it is the third of those, not the first, that changes your bookings.