Some hotels choose whether to be in the heart of the city or to escape it. At Marriott, they decided that between two Paragraph hotels in Tbilisi, one does not have to choose.
Five-star hotels await at both ends of the cable car, each offering a different kind of vacation. Below, in Freedom Square, stands the Paragraph Freedom Square, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Marriott, featuring 220 rooms and suites. Step out the door, and you are right in the center of the action: Sololaki, Rustaveli, the Old City, restaurants, and bars. Above, on Mount Tabori, sits the Paragraph Golf & Spa Resort Tabori, offering 177 rooms, a spa, pools, and a nine-hole golf course. The connection between them is the main draw.
Guests take an elevator from the city hotel lobby to the cable car station on the 11th floor, ride to the station on level minus-2 of the mountain hotel, and take an elevator up to its lobby. The reverse journey follows the exact same path. Within about ten minutes, travelers move from Freedom Square to the mountain resort. It functions as an elevator between hotels, except instead of climbing a few floors, the aerial route stretches nearly two kilometers, with all of Tbilisi unfolding below.
$20 million to skip the traffic jam
The cable car consists of two sections, totaling approximately 1.9 kilometers in length, with the investment estimated at around $20 million. Crazy? Not necessarily.
A local real estate developer specializing in hospitality estimated to Walla Tourism that the direct connection to the city center quintupled the land value on the mountain. In other words, the cable car is not just a convenient way to transport guests from one side to the other; it is also part of the business model.
Behind the development of the Tabori complex is Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire considered Georgia's wealthiest person and its former prime minister. He too apparently understands a thing or two about location. The cabin offers an intriguing aerial view of the glass-and-metal complex he built for himself on the mountainside, a structure hard to miss in the Tbilisi skyline.
However, who needs a cable car when there is a private helipad. The Tabori hotel opened at the end of September 2025. Total investment in the hotel, golf course, and cable car was estimated at more than half a billion lari, or more than $192 million.
Spa in the morning, city at night
The link between the two hotels creates a vacation option that is difficult to find in a standard hotel. Guests staying at the urban hotel can start their morning in Freedom Square, travel up the mountain for the spa, pool, golf, or a few hours of quiet greenery, and head back down in the evening for a restaurant in the city.
Those staying on the mountain follow the opposite route: Waking up at the resort, traveling down to central Tbilisi, strolling through Sololaki and the Old City, eating, drinking, shopping, and riding back up to their room without hailing a taxi. The mountain hotel suddenly sits a short cable car ride away from the city, while the central hotel gained a resort just minutes above it.
The journey itself is worth the ride. As the cabin ascends, the rooftops of Sololaki and central Tbilisi open up below, revealing the city from a completely different angle. On the other side, as noted, lies that same top-down view of Ivanishvili's home and the luxury residences on the mountainside.
Anyone reminded of Haifa's Cable Express, running from the Hamifratz Central Bus Station to the Technion and the University of Haifa, is not entirely mistaken. Behind both systems stands Doppelmayr, one of the world's largest manufacturers of cable car systems. In Tbilisi, however, it built a system with a slightly less academic purpose: A cable car directly connecting a luxury city hotel to a mountain spa and golf hotel.
Two wings of the same vacation
Urban cable cars exist around the world, as do resorts connected to mountain lifts and networks. Yet a planned connection between two complementary luxury hotels, one in the city center and one on the mountain, functioning essentially as two wings of the same vacation, is an intriguing concept. Freedom Square received a mountain resort, while Tabori gained a lobby in the heart of the city. All this luxury remains in Georgia.
And how much does it cost?
In a check for the night between October 1 and October 2, the price for a couple in a single room was 421.2 lari, about $161, at the Tabori hotel, compared to 884 lari, about $339, at the Freedom Square hotel. For a weekend night between October 3 and October 4, rates were found at 468 lari, about $179, on the mountain, and 1,040 lari, about $399, at the hotel in the center.
In the end, this is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the project: Guests do not have to choose between Tbilisi and a resort. In the morning you are in the city, in the afternoon on the mountain, and in the evening back in the city. Only this time, the way back to the hotel passes above the rooftops.