Georgia’s hotels and hotel-type enterprises serve 8.4% more guests in 2018

Last year, Georgia’s hotels and hotel-type enterprises served 3 666.1 thousand guests which are 8.4 percent higher compared to 2017.

The information was released by Georgia’s National Statistics Office (Geostat), which also reads that 71.3 percent of the guests were foreigners.

More precisely, 19.7 percent of the served guests were Russian citizens, which is 29.4 percent higher than in 2017.

As for the EU countries, most of the guests were citizens of Germany (23.2 percent) and Poland (19.5 percent), while the majority of guests from other countries were citizens of Turkey (20.9 percent) and Israel (18.8 percent).

Moreover, hotels and hotel-type enterprises in Georgia mostly had guests for holiday and recreation (77.7 percent) while 11% visited the country for business and 18.1% for medical treatment.

Besides, the majority of foreign guests staying in hotels and hotel-type enterprises with the purpose of holiday and recreation were Russian and Turkish nationals -20.7 and 11.2 percent respectively.

Geostat statistics also show that in 2018, 1 541 economic entities were working in hotel services in Georgia which owned 1 639 hotel and hotel-type enterprises, which is 2.8 percent higher than in 2017.

The agency says that the most widespread organizational-legal form for economic entities engaged in hotel services was the limited liability society, which comprised 58.3 percent of the total number of hotels and hotel-type enterprises operating last year.

Moreover, 99.1% of hotel and hotel-type enterprises were privately owned and 0.9 percent state-owned.

According to Geostat, the total area of the hotels and hotel-type enterprises in Georgia was 1 927.9 thousand square meters, which is 7.7 percent more than in 2017. Out of which it was leased 70.5 thousand square meters, and the living area of all rooms was 958.6 thousand square meters, which is 8.7 percent more than in the previous year.

“In 2018, the total number of places in hotels and hotel-type enterprises was 72.6 thousand, which is 8.4 percent higher than the same indicator of the previous year. The total number of rooms increased by 8.2 percent and equaled to 33.2 thousand,” the statistics read.

To note, 19 261 people were employed in hotels and hotel-type enterprises in Georgia last year, out of which majority -57.6 percent -were women.