If you've ever dreaded transiting through Delhi on your way to Varanasi or Amritsar, Air India has some good news. Its flag carrier's "Easy Connect" service — which lets Australian travellers check their bags all the way through to their final Indian city, skipping the carousels, customs and immigration at Delhi airport — is set to expand significantly over the next six months.
The numbers explain why the airline bothered. Until now, connecting through Delhi meant at least three hours on the ground to collect and recheck luggage. With Easy Connect, Air India's global head of sales Manish Puri says that minimum connecting time drops to somewhere between 60 minutes and four hours, since there's nothing for passengers to do at Delhi at all. The same applies in reverse: flying home, your bags are checked straight through to Australia and you clear border control at your original Indian departure point.
Currently the service covers flights to Varanasi, Amritsar and Ahmedabad, but Puri told Australian media in Melbourne that 10 to 12 more cities are expected to join within six months, pending government approval. That matters because roughly 35% of Australian travellers to India are heading beyond Delhi, and another 12% are using India as a springboard elsewhere — often via Southeast Asian carriers because the connections were easier. Air India wants that traffic back, and early results suggest it's working: on Melbourne-Amritsar, its market share jumped from 32% to 55% in the months after the hub-and-spoke model launched.
There's also plenty brewing on the Australia side. Air India currently flies 11 times weekly between Melbourne and Sydney, and has been linked with adding Brisbane and Adelaide. Nothing is confirmed, but Puri points to a 90-strong widebody aircraft order as the fuel for future network growth, and name-checked the soon-to-open Western Sydney International Airport as a possibility. The airline has already upgauged Melbourne to a larger Boeing 777 thanks to strong premium and corporate demand, and expects its share of the corporate market to climb from 10% to around 25% as new cabin products roll out in Melbourne and Sydney in the first quarter of next year.
For travellers, this is genuinely useful news. Anyone with family ties in Punjab or plans to see the Taj Mahal-free side of India — the temples of Varanasi, the heritage of Ahmedabad — can now book a single ticket through to their destination without the old multi-hour Delhi rigmarole. And if the route expansion lands, Aussies outside the two big eastern capitals may soon get direct options of their own. Keep an eye on announcements over the next few months.
