The three hours nobody budgets for
Indian domestic flying is efficient and cheap and it eats more of your day than the flight time suggests.
Plan on leaving the hotel about three hours before departure in the big metros. Security is thorough, the airports are large, and the drive to the airport is the drive to the airport. On the far side, bags take a while.
So a fifty-minute flight is really most of a half day, door to door. Two of those in one trip is a day of your holiday spent in terminals, which is fine if you chose it and infuriating if nobody told you.
Where this bites hardest is the 6am departure that looks clever because it "saves a day". It does not save a day. It costs you the previous evening, a 3am alarm, and the first afternoon, which you will spend asleep.
Our rule of thumb: no more than one internal flight per week of travel, and never one before 9am unless the alternative is genuinely worse. The drive you were avoiding is often four hours with a stop for lunch, and you see a country rather than a lounge.
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