Tour packages from Delhi: five circuits that start at your hotel door

Why Delhi

What makes the capital the best circuit base in India

Three things. The first is geography: Delhi sits at the top of the Gangetic plain with good highways running out of it in every direction, so the mountains, the desert and the Mughal monuments are all within a day. No other Indian city has that spread.

The second is the roads themselves. The Yamuna Expressway to Agra, the Delhi-Jaipur highway and the motorway to Chandigarh are among the best in the country, which is what makes a 233 or 270-kilometre leg a comfortable morning rather than an ordeal. The difference between driving these roads and driving, say, the Bihar trunk routes is considerable.

The third is the airport. Delhi has by far the widest international and domestic connections in northern India, which means the circuit can start the morning after you land rather than requiring a connecting flight. The Delhi airport chauffeur page covers the meet, and the Delhi chauffeur page the city itself.

A word on the arrival itself, because it sets the tone for everything after it. Delhi’s airport has three terminals and international arrivals overwhelmingly use T3, where the walk from the aircraft to the arrivals hall can take twenty minutes on its own. The chauffeur waits at the exit with a name board rather than in the car park, the flight is tracked so a delay costs nothing, and an hour of waiting is inside the fixed transfer fare.

The second thing worth planning is the first night. A circuit that starts the morning after a long-haul arrival works far better than one that starts the same afternoon, and hotels near the airport at Aerocity make that easy without committing you to a city-centre location you may not want. The desk will say which side of the city to sleep on given your first leg — Agra and Jaipur both leave from the south, so a night in Gurugram or Aerocity saves an hour of morning traffic that a Connaught Place hotel would cost you.

Before you go

Give Delhi a day before the circuit starts

Almost every circuit here treats Delhi as an airport with a hotel attached, which is a mistake worth avoiding. The city holds three UNESCO World Heritage sites within half an hour of each other — Humayun’s Tomb, Qutub Minar and the Red Fort — and a great deal more besides. A single day before the driving starts also settles the jet lag, which makes the first long leg considerably more pleasant.

The natural shape of that day is Mughal in the morning and imperial in the afternoon. Humayun’s Tomb, built in the 1560s, is the prototype the Taj Mahal refined eighty years later, and seeing it first makes Agra read differently. Qutub Minar, further south, is three centuries older again. Then Jama Masjid and a walk into Chandni Chowk, and the Rajpath, India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan as the light goes.

The less obvious half-day is Lutyens’ Delhi and the National Museum, which holds the best single collection of Indian antiquities anywhere and is almost always quiet. Nizamuddin Dargah on a Thursday evening for the qawwali is the other one people remember, and the chauffeur will know where to drop, because the lanes around the shrine are for walking.

None of this needs an extra charter day if you are flying in the day before the circuit; it fits into the arrival afternoon and the following morning. The Delhi chauffeur page prices a city day on its own, and the Delhi guide covers the districts and the hotels.