Batumi Airport to Turkey: Hopa, Rize and Artvin

Option 1 — a Pegasus ticket sold "to Hopa"

Pegasus sells tickets with Hopa listed as the destination. The flight lands at Batumi (BUS), and a road shuttle runs across the Sarpi border crossing — free of charge, about 45 minutes, ending at Hopa Port. Pegasus describes it as free for passengers arriving at Batumi Airport, not only for its own ticket holders.

Pegasus states directly that citizens of Turkey need neither a visa nor a passport for Georgia. But it describes the ID-card crossing narrowly: for passengers on its Istanbul–Hopa flights using the free shuttle, and with a new-generation chip ID card. About any other case — travelling independently, or an older card — the source says nothing, so take a passport rather than count on it. Other nationalities need whatever the Georgia–Turkey land border normally requires of them.

Confirm the shuttle exists for your specific flight when booking. And do not confuse it with Havaş: Havaş is a different carrier, and its own service list does include a Hopa to Batum Airport connection — but it publishes no timetable for it. The free Pegasus shuttle and a Havaş bus are separate services; confirm each with its own operator.

Option 2 — on your own via Sarpi

The independent route is cheap and runs on your schedule. Four steps:

Border notes

• Neither border service publishes opening hours for the Sarpi crossing, so do not count on a night crossing without a fallback. Summer daytime queues are real — early morning and late evening are usually quicker.
• Carry both currencies: GEL for the bus on the Georgian side, TRY for the dolmuş on the Turkish side.
• Check your own visa and entry rules for both countries before travelling — the ID-card route above applies to Turkish citizens on those Pegasus services only.
• The Artvin–Hopa road can be closed by bad weather, and shuttles along it are cancelled when that happens — Havaş warns about this on its own service page. Worth checking before you travel on to Artvin.

On to Trabzon

Trabzon is the region’s main city and has its own airport, so the practical question is which one you fly into. From BUS the drive is about 201 km — roughly 2 hours 40 minutes by road — or 195 km to Trabzon Airport itself. The route is the one described above: down the coast, across at Sarpi, then the Turkish coastal highway through Hopa.

That is driving time only. Nobody publishes the queue at Sarpi, and in summer it can add more than the drive itself, so treat 2 hours 40 minutes as the floor rather than the plan.