2018-04-04
Increasing the tourist flow is crucially important for reaching good economic growth rates.
2017 has proved record-breaking in terms of tourist numbers, with Georgia hosting more than 7.5 million international visitors.
The tourist growth rate reached 28%, a truly unprecedented indicator.
According to January-March statistics, Georgia hosted 1.5 million international visitors, and the number of visiting tourists is also up 28% year-over-year.
In March alone, we had a 33% year-over-year growth in tourist numbers, which is very important.
It is especially noteworthy that, similar to our neighbors, the growth rates of visitors from the EU are also high. In particular, the number of the visitors from Great Britain is up 74%, from Germany 47%, from Latvia 45%, and from Lithuania and France 35% and 25%, respectively. Direct flights are very important in this regard, and we are happy to see that flight statistics to and from the Kutaisi airport, and the airports of Tbilisi and Batumi, are also growing. I was pleased to learn the news a few days ago about the Georgian Airways, a Georgia company, launching new direct flights to a number of European cities. I hope that this trend is not seasonal and will continue beyond.
Tourism in 2016 brought in 2 billion USD in Georgia, and in 2017 this number reached 2.75 billion USD, which is revenues directly from tourism for our population in a variety of ways, such as money spent in hotels, on food, transport, and family-run hotels. All this is direct income for our country's population. It is very important, as you will agree, and we must continue our efforts to ensure infrastructural investments in line with the four-point agenda. We must step up our efforts toward developing spatial planning, so that this spent money will return as profit to our population, and I once again would like to wish success to Maya Tskitishvili in this direction.
Of course, we have implemented very important work in the past few years, and an unprecedentedly large budget has been completed, in which Zurab Alavidze has played an important role, and I once again thank him for that.
Prime Minister's Press Office