We are a chauffeur company writing about the cheap alternative to a chauffeur company. Read the rest knowing that. We are doing it because the honest answer is useful, and a guest who takes an app into town at midday and books a car for the mountain day on Thursday is a better customer than one who felt oversold on day one.
The app you already have probably does not work
This is the first thing worth knowing and the thing most arrivals learn at the kerb. The global ride-hail app that works in most of Europe does not operate in Georgia: the company merged its Georgian business into a regional platform in a deal announced in 2017, and today the familiar app is not an option. Travellers open it in arrivals, see nothing, and conclude the country has no ride-hail. It has a great deal of it, under different names.
What the country actually runs on is Bolt and Yandex Go, with a third budget platform covering smaller towns. Both of the main two work in Tbilisi, Batumi and Kutaisi. Both are cheap by the standards of anywhere the guest has flown in from.
Download before you fly
The practical consequence of the above is a small one that causes a disproportionate number of bad first hours. Install the app and complete the account while you still have working data, because completing a phone verification on airport wifi while jetlagged is a worse experience than it sounds, and some verification flows want an SMS that a roaming line will not always deliver promptly.
A guest who lands at 1am without a working app is down to the airport taxi rank, at a fixed 40 ₾ to the centre; the address still has to be explained, often in a language the guest does not speak.
Where the apps are genuinely good
Daytime, in town, one or two people, light bags. The apps are the correct answer and we will say so without qualification. Tbilisi is compact, the fares are low, and the coverage in the central districts is dense enough that waits are short.
They are also good for the trip you did not plan: the restaurant that turned out to be across town, the evening that ran late. Nobody should book a chauffeur for that, and we would say so.
Where they fail at the airport specifically
Four things, in rough order of how often they bite.
The pickup zone is not where you are standing. Airport pickup for app cars is a designated area rather than the arrivals kerb, and the walk is not obvious when you are following a map pin with a suitcase. The driver waits, the clock runs, and the conversation that follows happens in Georgian or Russian.
Surge at the exact moment you need it. Several international arrivals landing inside the same hour is normal at Tbilisi, and the app price at 2am after three flights land together is not the app price the guest read about on a forum.
Cancellations on long runs. A driver who accepts an airport job and then sees it is going somewhere far, or somewhere with a poor return fare, sometimes does not come. At midday this costs four minutes. At 2am it is the whole problem.
The late-night gap. The 1 ₾ airport bus, whose hours the airport publishes, stops around 11pm. Between then and morning the apps are the cheapest option, and that is precisely the window in which they are thinnest.
None of these make the apps a bad product. They make them a bad product for an arrival that has to work.
The honest split
For a solo traveller landing in daylight with hand luggage, use an app or the one-lari bus and keep the difference.
For a 2am arrival, a family with four suitcases, a guest with no Georgian and no Russian (ask which languages the driver speaks), or any arrival where somebody is waiting at the other end, book the car. Why the early and late slots are the trickiest is the same argument from the other side.
For a guest who has booked the airport’s Meet & Greet, the question still arises: its agents see the guest into a taxi or a private car, so the car itself has to be arranged before landing.
What a booked car does that an app structurally cannot
Not comfort. The argument is narrower than that.
An app driver is dispatched when you request the car, at whatever price the app shows at that moment. A booked car has its fare agreed in writing before it is dispatched, and the booking carries the flight number rather than a guess. What happens if the flight is four hours late is a question to ask when you book; the answer comes back in writing with the fare. That is the entire difference, and on most arrivals it is worth nothing at all.
It is also why the address matters as much as the hotel name on any job. Tbilisi has several pairs of hotels with names close enough that a driver given the name alone can take a guest to the wrong one; arriving at Tbilisi’s hotels by car goes through the drop-off side.
What we tell people who ask
Take the app. Then, if the trip includes a wine day, a mountain day, or a flight you cannot miss, book those separately, because those are the days where what you are actually hiring stops being transport and starts being someone else holding the risk.
Nobody needs a Maybach to get to dinner. Some arrivals need one of our cars at 5am, and that is not the same booking.
For the arrivals that have to work, fixed-fare airport transfers are confirmed in writing before the car is dispatched. For the ones that do not, the app is on your phone already.