My trip to Yerevan back in 2022 was an important travel milestone – a first step outside of Europe and North America. I really enjoyed my time in Armenia (and it gave me the confidence to tackle Japan a year later), so when BA announced flights to neighbouring Georgia I was keen to revisit the Caucasus.
Being on the inaugural flight also appealed… except my experience from the Cincinnati launch suggested I’d encounter more fanfare if I joined the first flight from Tbilisi, rather than to it. That meant, however, that I would have to find my own way to Georgia a few days earlier. As I’d discovered with the ETF, this part of the world is hard to access from the west, doubly-so if you don’t want to arrive in the middle of the night. To get to Armenia I’d routed through Dubai; and my first solution for this trip was a similar overshoot, via Qatar.
I’d got as far as booking London to Doha with avios, and Doha to Tbilisi with Alaska miles – both on Qatar Airways, the former letting me try their legendary Q-suite business class. It was only when I turned my attention to hotel accommodation that I realised why redemptions had been so easy to secure, and rooms were so cheap – my transfer would coincide with Ramadan. In Qatar, it’s illegal to eat or drink in public from dawn until sunset during Ramadan – combined with temperatures in the mid 30s, the two nights I’d intended to stay seemed unviable. Fortunately I was able to cancel my bookings without penalty and start again.
The best alternative was over Istanbul, flying there with BA then trying Turkish Airlines for the first time to complete my connection. I also reworked my plans to maximise my time in Tbilisi, with just an overnight stay to protect against any flight delays. This turned out to be very much the right move – I didn’t take to Turkey, and would have been disappointed if I’d had longer there (or, probably, Qatar) at the expense of my real destination. Even so, a three night stay in Tbilisi proper would translate to six nights away: on the outbound I would stop in both London and Istanbul, whilst a 7:30am departure from Tbilisi airport meant it made sense to relocate to a more local hotel the night before.
I tracked the whole adventure chronologically / cartographically with polarsteps, so you can find my thoughts on all of the flights and hotels there (I never quite got around to a Flyertalk trip report). Here, meanwhile, I’ve tried to polish those raw materials into more thematic posts, plus of course curate a selection of my better photos.