The trip home to India is getting easier, if you are flying to the right city

Every spring, the same quiet arithmetic runs through Indian Australian households. The October school holidays, Diwali and the start of the cricket season all fall within a few weeks of one another, and hundreds of thousands of people begin pricing the long flight back to India at precisely the moment airlines know they can charge the most. For years the honest answer was that there were simply not enough non-stop seats to go around. That is beginning to change, though unevenly, and not for every city on the map.

When Qantas returned to the Melbourne to Delhi route on 27 October 2025, the airline made no secret of who it was chasing. Cam Wallace, the chief executive of Qantas International, described the service as “perfectly suited for Indian fans attending cricket events in Melbourne,” with the Twenty20 series, the Ashes and the Big Bash all on the summer calendar. The flights run three times a week on an Airbus A330-200, coded QF69 and QF70, offering about 1,300 seats each week and more than 30,000 across the season, which was scheduled to end on 28 March 2026. Qantas had suspended the route only months earlier, in June 2025. The carrier has since opened offices in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.

Air India is doing the heavy lifting

The bigger story sits with Air India. On the Delhi to Melbourne route, Air India began flying an upgraded Boeing 777-300ER from 1 July 2026, replacing the smaller 787-8 and adding First Class suites and Wi-Fi to the route for the first time. The wide-body carries 328 passengers, with eight First Class suites, 40 flat-bed business seats and 280 in economy, and the service moved to daily from 1 September.

IndiGo is circling the market

India’s largest airline, IndiGo, does not yet fly its own aircraft to Australia, reaching the country instead through a codeshare with Qantas. That may not last. IndiGo has a firm order for the long-range Airbus A350, with deliveries expected to begin in 2027.

Western Sydney and the routes still on paper

Some of the most talked about connections do not exist yet. Western Sydney International Airport is due to open to passengers in late October 2026, with Singapore Airlines confirmed as its first international carrier.

What the extra seats mean for fares and families

The people most affected are not tourists but the diaspora itself: students heading home for the mid-year and summer breaks, and families making the visits that dominate travel between the two countries. Because the new Air India capacity lands squarely in the October to March peak, it should take some heat out of the top-end fares that families dread around Diwali and Christmas.

Honesty requires the caveats, though, because the growth is not uniform. Qantas suspended its Sydney to Bengaluru service from August to the end of October 2026, blaming high fuel costs and redeploying aircraft to Europe, which meant its only year-round link to southern India went dark during the very build-up to peak season. Its Melbourne to Delhi flights remain seasonal rather than permanent. And for anyone whose family is in Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi or, while the Qantas pause lasts, Bengaluru, a non-stop from Sydney or Melbourne still does not exist; the journey means a change of plane in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur or a Gulf hub, with the extra hours and cost that brings. Almost all of the new capacity favours Delhi, and to a lesser extent Mumbai, in the north and west.

So the trip home is easing, but the relief is lumpy. If your people are in the north, the next few years should bring more seats, more choice and, most likely, gentler peak fares. If they are in the south, the map still asks you to be patient, and to keep one eye on what IndiGo and Qantas eventually decide to do.