“Car with driver” is the phrase almost everyone types, and in Georgia it covers at least four different products, sold by four different kinds of business, at prices several multiples apart. None of them is wrong. They are just not the same thing.
This piece sets them out, so the first email can be the brief.
The four things the phrase means
A transfer. One pickup, one drop, a fixed price. Airport to hotel, hotel to a restaurant. The clock is not running; the route is the product. What an airport transfer costs and why is the clearest worked example.
An hourly hire. The car and driver are yours for a block of time, usually with a minimum. You decide where it goes while the meter of hours runs. This is the right shape for a day of meetings, a shopping afternoon, or anything where the itinerary will change at 2pm.
A day charter. Eight or nine hours, one route agreed in advance, one driver. This is what almost every day trip out of Tbilisi actually is, whether the brief calls it a tour or not.
A multi-day engagement. A car and driver for a week, moving with the guest, including the days when the car barely moves. This is a different job again, and it is quoted as one engagement, in writing, in advance.
The expensive mistake is buying the first and expecting the third. The confusion has grown with the market: Georgia logged close to seven million international visits in 2025, and the supply of people willing to drive them has grown faster than the vocabulary for describing what they sell.
What you are not hiring
You are not hiring a guide. A chauffeur who knows the Kakheti road well will tell you useful things about it, but a professional guide has separate training and charges a separate fee. SOIT is not a tour company and provides no guides, so if the brief needs commentary inside monasteries, plan the guide as a separate booking.
You are also not hiring a rental car with a person attached. The distinction sounds pedantic until the day goes wrong. What the chauffeur actually does is hold the parts of the day that are not driving: the parking, the closed road, the cellar that overran.
The questions that turn an enquiry into a quote
A quote that arrives without these having been asked is a guess, and it will move later.
How many people, and how much luggage. Three guests is a saloon. Four with suitcases is not, whatever the seat count says, and where the seven-seat car starts to win is a real line rather than an upsell.
Hours, not kilometres. Georgian distances are short and Georgian driving times are not. With 5.5 million tourist arrivals recorded in 2025, the well-known cellars and viewpoints now carry traffic that a route planner does not model. A planner that says ninety minutes to a cellar in Kakheti has not accounted for the last six kilometres of it.
Whether anyone is drinking. The single most consequential question on a wine day, and the reason renting is sometimes the better call, and sometimes very much is not.
What happens if the day runs long. Every serious operator has an extra-hour rate. Ours is published. If an operator will not name theirs before the day, that is the answer.
Who is driving on day four. On a multi-day booking, ask who drives each day; what is included is confirmed in writing with the fare, before the car is dispatched. The answer can change the experience more than the car does.
What it costs, in round numbers
We publish our rates. Hourly hire starts at 200 ₾ for the S-Class or the V-Class and 300 ₾ for either Maybach, on a three-hour minimum. A full day of eight to nine hours is 1 350 ₾ for the V-Class, 1 500 ₾ for the S-Class and 2 500 ₾ for a Maybach, with extra hours at 135, 150 and 250 ₾ respectively.
Those are the numbers for the four cars we run. They are not the right answer for every trip. A driver found through a hotel desk will be cheaper. Whether the difference matters depends entirely on which of the four products above you are actually buying.
The brief that gets a quote, not a question
Send the dates, the number of guests, the luggage, the shape of each day, and whether anything has a deadline attached to it. That is roughly the standard booking brief, and it is enough to quote against without a second exchange.
“A car with a driver for Tuesday” cannot be quoted as it stands: it needs the five answers above first, and getting them costs both sides an extra exchange.
One request, two products
A request for “a car and driver, Thursday, four guests” can turn out to be a 7am airport collection, three hours of meetings with waiting time, a drive to Kakheti and a return after dinner. That is not one product. It is a transfer and a fourteen-hour day stapled together, and quoting it as a single day charter would be wrong by several hundred lari.
The fix is not a better price. It is asking the questions above before quoting anything.
For a week or more, ask for a multi-day booking, quoted as one engagement, in writing, in advance. Send the shape of the trip to booking@soitblack.com and you will get a quote rather than a question.