We drive people for a living, so the useful thing we can offer on self-driving is not encouragement or discouragement. It is the set of facts that are tedious to assemble and expensive to get wrong, most of which the rental desk will not raise and some of which it will get wrong in its own favour.
Whether you should drive at all is a separate question we have answered elsewhere, including when renting is the better choice. This piece assumes you have decided.
Your licence, and the clock that starts at the border
A foreign driving licence is recognised in Georgia for one year from your most recent entry into the country. The clock starts at the border stamp, not at the date on the licence, which means a two-week holiday is comfortably inside it and a long stay is not.
An International Driving Permit is not legally required. Georgia is a party to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic and recognises licences issued by other signatories directly. A clear account of the rule is worth reading before an agency tells you otherwise.
Two practical caveats sit on top of that. Rental companies may demand an IDP as their own commercial policy even though the law does not, so carry one if your licence is not in Latin script and you want the counter conversation to be short. And the original licence must be carried in the car; a photograph of it on a phone is not a document.
Winter tyres are a legal requirement with a date range
This is the rule most visitors have never heard of. Since 2024, vehicles on specified roads must run winter tyres from 1 December to 1 March. The Ministry of Internal Affairs sets the specification: the snowflake marking, a minimum tread depth of 3 millimetres for cars, tyres no older than ten years, and a 100 ₾ fine with licence points for driving without them.
Ask the rental desk explicitly whether the car you are collecting in January is compliant, and look at the sidewall yourself. A summer-shod hire car on the climb to the Cross Pass is the specific failure this law exists to prevent, and it is the road where the winter conditions do the deciding.
Alcohol
Georgia’s limit is strict, enforcement is real, and the penalties are not nominal. Under Article 116 of the Code of Administrative Offences, more than 0.3 per mille of alcohol in the blood costs a first offender the licence for six months, and more than 0.7, or refusing the test, costs it for a year. Repeat offences add fines from 2 000 ₾. The suspension is the part that ends a holiday.
This matters more here than in most countries because of what the holiday is. A day on the wine roads of Kakheti is not a tasting room with a spittoon and a schedule. It is a succession of cellars where the person pouring made the wine, and declining is harder than visitors expect. Plan the wine day as a day you are not driving, whoever drives it.
What the roads are actually like
The main network is good and has improved sharply. The motorway spine is fast, the new Rikoti tunnel section has replaced the slow two-lane climb over the pass, where lorries used to set the pace on the run west, and fuel is everywhere.
The difficulty is not surface quality. It is local driving convention, which is assertive, and the mix of traffic. Expect overtaking into gaps you would not use, livestock on rural roads without warning, and unlit pedestrians at night outside towns. None of this is dangerous to an alert driver. All of it is tiring in a way that compounds across a long day.
Mountain roads are a separate category again. The road to Svaneti is a long climb on surfaces that punish unfamiliarity, and the gorge on the approach to Vardzia is narrow and slow at the end of an already long drive.
Insurance, and the gap that is usually in it
Check what the rental actually includes before signing. The collision damage waiver sold at the counter typically carries an excess, often in the hundreds of dollars. Read what the waiver excludes. Tyres, glass, underbody and anything described as off-road are the usual exclusions, and they are precisely the damage a mountain road produces.
If the plan includes unsurfaced roads, say so at the counter and get the answer in writing. A rental agreement that silently voids cover on gravel is a bad surprise to have on the far side of a pass.
The hybrid that most itineraries want
Rent for the unstructured middle of the trip. Book a car for the wine day, the mountain day and anything with a boarding time attached. That split is what we recommend for most itineraries, because those three or four days of a fortnight are exactly the ones a hire car handles worst, and they are where our day-trip work fits.
Georgia took close to seven million international visits in 2025, and Geostat’s 2025 inbound tourism survey counts 78.4 per cent of visits as repeat visits.
A single day is a reasonable booking
A hire car for most of the trip and one driven day can sit together: a cellar day in Kakheti, or a climb you looked at on a map and reconsidered. That is the right use of both products, and one day is as reasonable a booking as ten.
To weigh which days of a specific itinerary are worth a driver, send the route to booking@soitblack.com with the days you are unsure about; the fare for each comes back in writing before the car is dispatched.