Delhi Airport as a transit point for going anywhere from US to South India and back is an absolute horror show.
I recently(April 2023) travelled from Chicago to Hyderabad via IGI airport. At first, I was happy that the only place I was going to be landing was directly in India after taking off from Chicago, soon after landing in Delhi my excitement turned into a horror show.
Once I landed in Delhi even though my final destination was Hyderabad, I had to go through the Immigration terminal and get my passport stamped in Delhi itself. After that, I had to collect my check-in baggage in Delhi, even though my destination was Hyderabad, which took about 45mins of my time. Once after this, I had to wait at the Air India Check in counter again for another 1hour to check the bags again for my Hyderabad flight, after almost 2 hours of unnecessary process I had to go through long domestic security check lines to reach my departure gates.
On the whole by the time I reached my Hyderabad flight gate, I had spent 2.5 hours simply collecting my baggage and checking it back in. I had travelled with Air India in the same route prior to Covid and the Airlines had taken care of transferring the luggage by themselves and all I needed was to just go through an international security check, this is something that is very common with every other international transit, and then collect my luggage at final destination only once. But this method of rechecking luggage is absolute bullshit and something the Indian authorities need to pay attention to if they are trying to make transit for travelers at Delhi a smooth ride.
My return journey was even more tiring when I started from Hyderabad and landed in Delhi to catch my flight to Chicago. I had about 4.5 hours of layover so I thought I could be relaxing during that time but because our Indian immigration employees who get paid even if they don’t do their jobs I had to wait in line for about 3.5 hours to get my immigration stamping done. There was literally one employee who was stamping passengers coming from about 3 flights that landed around the same time. This is absolutely pathetic as it does put India in a very bad light since there were many frustrated passengers both Indians and other foreigners who were all just worried that they would miss their flights because of how horribly mismanaged the Airport staff is at Delhi, only one employee dealing with 300 -500 passengers.
Hopefully, all the employees will be held accountable and DGCI of India pays attention to the plights of the air travelers and improves and applies simple and effective common sense laws at Indian Airports. Until that happens I will never again choose a transit flight through Delhi(mostly Air India) and fly through Middle East carriers where the transit is much more streamlined and really stress-free.