Kutaisi Very cheap
The green market is the best in the country — cheese, churchkhela, spices, fruit — and the khinkali here are the size of a fist. Imeretian khachapuri, the round one, is the local kind. Everything is cheaper than in the capital.
Budget travel in Georgia
What a visitor's money does in Georgia: every guide rated from very cheap to very expensive, cheapest first, then the things that cost travellers money without buying anything — the ATM, the taxi, the SIM.
Good value average across 6 guides · 5 is very cheap
Money
Georgian Lari (GEL) · 1 EUR = 2.95 GEL · 1 USD = 2.60 GEL
Exchange booths are everywhere, competitive and honest, and beat the banks — the rate is posted in the window and there is no commission. Euros and dollars both change well.
ATMs
Avoid: standalone machines in the old town tourist streets, which charge and push conversion
Use: TBC Bank, Bank of Georgia, Liberty Bank
Most bank machines are free with a foreign card. The exchange booths are also genuinely good here — the rate is in the window and there is no commission, which is unusual.
Getting around
A short ride in Tbilisi: 5–12 GEL across town — cheap
From the airport: Tbilisi airport to the centre 25–40 GEL
Far cheaper, and the app removes the haggle entirely.
City by city, cheapest first
Tbilisi Good value
One of the great underrated cuisines. Khinkali are soup dumplings eaten by hand, twisted top left on the plate as a tally. Khachapuri adjaruli is a bread boat of cheese with an egg in it. And the wine is fermented in buried clay qvevri, which is where all wine came from.
Batumi Good value
Adjarian khachapuri — the boat of bread with cheese, butter and a raw egg — was invented here and is best here. The fish restaurants at the port sell by weight; the Turkish influence shows in the kebabs and the baklava. Chacha, the grape spirit, is offered everywhere.
Kazbegi Good value
Khinkali and shashlik in the guesthouses, which is where you eat — a full dinner with the family’s wine and chacha is included in most rooms. The Rooms hotel does the cocktail-and-view end. Bring snacks for the mountain; there is nothing up there.
Mestia Good value
Kubdari — the Svan meat pie with spices — is the dish, and every guesthouse makes it. Svan salt, the spiced salt, goes home in the bag. Guesthouses feed you breakfast and dinner, and that is where the food is; there are a few cafés on the square and not much else.
Sighnaghi Good value
Kakheti is the wine: qvevri amber wines in the family cellars, tasted in the cellar with bread and cheese. Mtsvadi (pork shashlik on vine cuttings) and the walnut dishes are the food; Pheasant’s Tears is the restaurant everybody has heard of and it is good.
The cost rating is this site's own, for a visitor, from the guides' authors and the corrections readers send in. The general rules — the conversion prompt, shoulder season, the airport taxi — are in budget travel tips.
The guides in Georgia
TbilisiGeorgiaSulphur baths under a fortress, wine made in clay eggs for eight thousand years, and rents that brought the nomads
BatumiGeorgiaA Black Sea resort of glass towers and old wooden houses, subtropical gardens, casinos, and khachapuri shaped like a boat
KazbegiGeorgiaA church on a hill under a 5,000-metre volcano, at the top of the Georgian Military Highway, three hours from the capital
MestiaGeorgiaSvaneti: medieval defence towers in every village, Europe’s highest inhabited valleys, and a four-day walk to Ushguli
KutaisiGeorgiaGeorgia’s second city and the budget airline gateway: a monastery on the hill, caves and canyons half an hour out, and prices half of Tbilisi’s
SighnaghiGeorgiaThe City of Love on a hilltop in the wine country, walls with twenty-three towers, and the Caucasus across the valley on a clear day