Tbilisi International Airport

Tbilisi International Airport (TBS), officially Shota Rustaveli Tbilisi International Airport, is the busiest and largest airport in the South Caucasus and the primary gateway to Georgia, handling more than 4.5 million passengers a year. Serving the Georgian capital and a national population of 3.7 million, as well as spillover demand from neighboring Armenia, Azerbaijan and parts of the North Caucasus, TBS has become one of the fastest-growing airports in the CIS since 2022, fueled by a relocation of Russian business travel, booming tourism from the Middle East and a dense low-cost network out of Europe. It is operated by TAV Georgia under a long-term concession. The airport sits about 17 km (11 mi) southeast of central Tbilisi, at an elevation of 1,624 ft (495 m), on the edge of the Iori River valley. A single 9,843 ft (3,000 m) concrete runway (13R/31L) supports widebody operations, and a parallel partial runway is used as a taxiway. The current terminal, opened in 2007 and progressively expanded by TAV, has a design capacity of around 3.5 million passengers, already exceeded in peak months; a planned new Terminal 2 announced in 2023 aims to roughly triple capacity and add multiple additional contact stands. Fifty airlines link TBS to 77 nonstop destinations — an unusually wide network for a catchment its size. Georgian Airways, Wizz Air, Pegasus, Turkish Airlines, flydubai, LOT Polish Airlines, Air France, Lufthansa, Qatar Airways, Air Arabia, Azerbaijan Airlines, Uzbekistan Airways and the Saudi carriers provide dense connections to Europe, the Gulf, Turkey, Central Asia and South Asia, plus a growing cluster of direct Chinese and Indian routes. Its position on the emerging Middle Corridor trade route and its popularity as a business-friendly alternative to Russian hubs keep TBS one of the most strategically watched airports in the wider region (2025).