India Elevated
A community from Elevated India
How to travel India in luxury
When to come. Where to go. Where to stay, and what is worth the money. Answered in the open, under their own names, by the people who plan these journeys for a living.
What this is
A room where the questions actually get answered
Most of what is written about travelling in India is written to sell you a journey, or by somebody who was here for nine days. This is a third thing.
It is a standing room where the people who plan these journeys for a living answer the questions in public, under their own names, including the ones with inconvenient answers. Ask whether a month is a mistake and you will be told that it is.
It is run by the curators at Elevated India. They are not a support desk and they are not anonymous.
Where it stands
The rooms
Arranged the way a journey is actually planned — when to come, where to go, where to stay, how to move, and what nobody tells you until you are there.
Latest from the rooms
Why this exists
India has built a tourism economy at home. It has not yet claimed its place in the world's imagination. Ten million foreign arrivals a year against France's hundred. Seventh in the world by arrivals and thirty-ninth on the index that measures how ready a country is to receive them.
Part of that gap is infrastructure and part of it is policy. A large part of it is simply that the country is hard to plan well from the outside. What a visitor finds is either a brochure or somebody's backpacking blog from 2011, and between those two there is almost nothing written for a traveller willing to spend properly and unwilling to waste the trip.
That space is what this is for. Closing even part of the gap is the work.
What you get here
Four things a brochure cannot do.
Every answer is signed by the curator who gave it. No house voice, no support ticket, no reply written by somebody who has never been.
Which month is a mistake. Which two nights deserve the extraordinary room. Where the money stops buying anything at all.
One question answered once, where the next person can find it. Nothing useful gets buried in a private thread.
You do not have to be travelling with us. You do not have to be travelling at all yet. The rooms are open either way.
The country is not one journey
It is a thousand worlds, on several different calendars, and choosing badly between them does more damage than anything else you will decide.
Where to go, and what to know first
Twelve of the rooms. Six places, and six things worth settling before you fly.
Ask a curator
Put the question to somebody who plans these for a living
Questions are answered in the open, so one answer serves everybody who comes looking later. You will get a name, a view, and where there is no single right answer you will get that too.
The curators are Elevated India staff. That is stated rather than hidden, because an answer is only worth anything when you know who is giving it and why.
Four kinds of place
Where you sleep shapes the trip more than almost anything else you choose. These are the four, and they are not ranked.
A former royal residence, now a hotel. Scale, ceremony and a certain amount of theatre. Marvellous for two or three nights and heavy for ten.
A merchant's townhouse in the old quarter. Courtyards rather than lawns. You are inside the city rather than above it.
Canvas, but not camping. Put up for the season beside a park or out in the desert. Some of the best rooms in India are tents.
Near a wildlife park and built around early mornings. Judged on its naturalists far more than its furniture.
Before you join
Do I have to be travelling with Elevated India?
No. The rooms are open to anybody planning India, or thinking about it, or simply curious. Most of what is written here applies whoever ends up arranging the trip.
What does it cost?
Nothing. Joining is free and there is nothing to buy here. The journeys Elevated India runs have their own room and are not the point of the rest of it.
Who actually answers?
The curators at Elevated India, under their own names and their real role lines. You can see who has written what on any member's page.
Is this just marketing?
It is run by Elevated India and does not pretend otherwise. What it is not is a brochure in disguise: the rooms are about travelling India well, and a good answer is sometimes one that costs us a booking.
When is the best time to come?
There is no single answer, and anybody who gives you one is describing Rajasthan and calling it the country. The When to Travel room takes it season by season.
Join India Elevated
Free to join, open to read, and answered by name. Ask your first question in Ask a Curator.