Delhi on a Budget: Getting There Without Overpaying

Saying you’re flying to Delhi cheaply usually means one of two things: you found a mistake fare nobody else spotted, or you did the unglamorous homework. I’ve done this trip three times now with two kids in tow, and the difference between the fare I book and the fare my brother-in-law books is usually the difference between a hotel upgrade and a hostel bunk. The logistics of getting four people from a mid-sized European city to Indira Gandhi International Airport (DEL) in October half-term is a puzzle of fare classes, connecting banks and the sort of 5 a.m. departures that make you question your choices.

Start with the Calendar, Not the Search Engine

The first thing I check is never the price. It’s the school holiday dates, because the fare buckets airlines release for those weeks are a completely different species from the ones in shoulder season. Flying out on the Saturday of half-term and returning the following Sunday, the cheapest direct option we found last October for flights to india was Lufthansa via Munich, which came in at €612 per person in economy. But I knew that the fare bucket for that same flight, the one the airline sells to people who book nine months out, was almost half that price.

So the actual routine is this: I pick the dates, then I look at what the fare rules say about changes and refunds, then I check the price on my usual search and compare it against booking directly on the airline’s site. The difference is often nothing, but occasionally the airline throws in a checked bag that the aggregator charges €40 each way for.

One thing I’ve learned the hard way, and it costs a lot of money: do not ignore the positioning flight. We live near Berlin, but flying out of Prague or Warsaw can knock €150 per person off the Delhi ticket, even after you pay for the cheap leg to get there. It means a night in a hotel and an extra meal for four, but on one trip we saved €480 total, which paid for the hotel twice over. The trap is the layover, so I always leave at least five hours between the positioning flight and the long-haul departure.

The Fare Class Trap Nobody Explains

Booking the cheapest fare class seems obvious until you realise what you’ve actually agreed to. The basic economy fare on most carriers flying to Delhi in winter is a no-checked-bag, no-seat-selection, no-change ticket that looks great in the search results and falls apart at the airport. Family of four, two weeks in India, nobody packs cabin-only.

The way I check for this before paying is to look at the fare code, which is buried in the booking site I end up on, usually just under the price. An economy fare in the N or Q bucket is roughly the same product as the one in the Y bucket except for the flexibility, but the price difference can be €200 each way. For that money you get to move your flight when the school announces an inset day you’d forgotten about.

• Check the fare code before you pay, not after
• Compare the price with one checked bag per person added on
• Look at the change fee, not just the headline price
• Check whether the connecting airport is the same terminal
• Always run the numbers on a positioning flight out of a nearby city

The Real Cost of Getting There

For the four of us, the total for Delhi in October 2025 came to €1,840 return, and that was with the positioning flight from Berlin to Prague included. The Delhi legs alone on the Indian carrier were €1,190 for all four, which works out at €298 per person, and the Prague-Berlin return was €320 for the four of us on the low-cost airline that flies that route. Flight time from Prague to Delhi is about seven and a half hours, which is short enough that the kids don’t fully lose their minds, and long enough that you still land feeling like you’ve been awake for three days.

The last thing I check, and this is the one people skip, is whether the through-fare actually exists for the routing I’m building. Some of the booking sites will happily sell you a split ticket that involves you collecting bags and rechecking them in Delhi, which is a guaranteed meltdown scenario. I check the connection time, the terminal, and whether the airline will through-check the luggage, and if the answer is no, I pay the extra €60 for the fare that does it properly. You can compare the real total for your own dates via this link, which is faster than doing what I do, which is opening eleven browser tabs and cross-referencing them against the airlines’ own sites.