Tour packages from Hyderabad: the Deccan, the coast and the temple south

The honest position

Why most Hyderabad circuits start with a flight

It would be easy to publish a list of long drives out of Hyderabad and call them circuits. We would rather be straightforward: the nearest genuinely rewarding multi-day routes are 350 to 600 kilometres away, which is seven to eleven hours of driving before the holiday starts. For almost every traveller, a one-hour flight and a chauffeur meeting the arrival is the better trip.

What we do, therefore, is arrange both halves as a single booking. The travel desk books the flight, the chauffeur meets you at the far end with a name board, and the same coordinator holds the whole itinerary. You get one point of contact and one invoice, and the car is waiting rather than being hunted for at an unfamiliar airport.

The exception is Hyderabad itself and its surroundings, which are genuinely worth days rather than hours: Golconda, the Qutb Shahi tombs, the Charminar and the old city, Ramoji Film City, and Warangal's Kakatiya temples about 145 kilometres north-east. The Hyderabad chauffeur page covers those as day hire rather than a circuit.

Hyderabad’s airport at Shamshabad is about 30 kilometres south of the city and, unusually for India, the drive in is genuinely quick — the expressway and the Outer Ring Road make it around forty minutes to most districts at most hours. That makes it one of the easier cities in the country to fly into the night before a circuit and leave from early the next morning. Traffic into the city is the exception rather than the rule here, which is why a late arrival and an early departure the next morning are both realistic in a way they are not in Mumbai or Bangalore.

It also has a general-aviation terminal, which matters for the small number of travellers arriving privately, and the chauffeur meets the aircraft there where the operator permits. For everyone else the meet is at the single arrivals hall with a name board, the flight tracked, and an hour of waiting inside the fixed fare. The Hyderabad airport chauffeur page covers both.

Before you go

Hyderabad deserves two days of its own

If the circuits from Hyderabad mostly begin with a flight, the compensation is that the city itself is one of the most rewarding in India and is routinely under-allocated. Golconda Fort, on a granite hill west of the city, is a genuine fortress rather than a palace — a nine-kilometre outer wall, acoustics at the entrance that carry a handclap to the summit, and a climb of several hundred steps that is worth making in the late afternoon.

Below it stand the Qutb Shahi tombs, a necropolis of some forty domed tombs set in gardens, recently and carefully restored. They are quieter than Golconda and, for many visitors, the better of the two. Together they make a full afternoon and early evening.

The old city around Charminar is the other day. The monument itself is from 1591; the Laad Bazaar beside it sells lacquer bangles as it has for four hundred years, and the Chowmahalla Palace a few minutes away holds the Nizams’ collection. This is also where the biryani argument is settled, and the chauffeur will have an opinion.

Ramoji Film City, about 33 kilometres out, is a different proposition entirely — the largest film studio complex in the world, and a full day if you have children. The Hyderabad chauffeur page prices a city day, and the city guide covers the districts and the airport.