Landing at Indira Gandhi International Airport

What DEL is like

Delhi is the entry point most travellers use for northern India, whether they connect onward the same night or start a Golden Triangle trip from here. The international terminal is genuinely large, and the walk from the aircraft door to the immigration queue is longer than most people expect. In the cold months fog can push arrival times around by hours, which in practice means messaging whoever is meeting you more than once. A working line at that moment matters more than the speed of it.

On arrival

Switch the eSIM line on as the wheels touch down and let the phone find a network while you walk off the jet bridge; service normally appears before you reach the passport queue. The first stretch of corridor is long and broken up by escalators, so if nothing has registered yet, wait until you reach the wide central hall before selecting a network by hand. Have your accommodation address open on the phone before you join the immigration line, because you will be asked for it and that is a bad moment to be searching an inbox. After baggage reclaim the exit is dense with people waiting for passengers, so walk clear of the barriers before you open a ride-hailing app. Trying to pin a pick-up point while standing inside that crowd rarely ends well.

How far the airport Wi-Fi gets you

There is free airport Wi-Fi, but the sign-up step usually wants to send a code to a phone number, which is circular logic for someone who has just landed without a working number. When several wide-bodies arrive together the portal page itself can crawl, and sessions are time limited rather than open ended. If your plan for the next ten minutes involves calling a hotel or checking an onward booking, a line that is already live means you never stand in the middle of the hall solving this. Treat the Wi-Fi as a fallback for a laptop, not as your arrival plan.

Getting into town

The cleanest way into town is the airport express metro, which reaches New Delhi station in around twenty minutes and connects to the rest of the network there. The alternative is a taxi or a ride booked in an app, which takes far longer at peak hours because the ring roads clog badly. On that drive the map stays open the whole way, and drivers often call to confirm where exactly you are standing, so the line needs to handle a call and not just data. Budget somewhere around 300 to 500MB for maps, the ride-hailing app and a few translated street names on that first leg. If you are connecting to a domestic flight instead, the shuttle between terminals is where people most often discover their phone has no service.

What people ask about this airport

• Switch on before the jet bridge: The arrivals corridor here is long, and waiting until the immigration hall means standing still in a stream of people while the phone searches.
• Keep the address offline: Save the hotel name and address as a note or screenshot so you can fill in an arrival form even before anything connects.
• Winter fog moves everything: In the foggy months actual landing times drift from the schedule, so pick a plan with a day of slack rather than one that ends exactly when your ticket says.
• Clear the meeting crowd first: App pick-up points sit beyond the doors, and booking while you stand at the barrier usually means the driver cannot find you.