India is at the center of a sweeping realignment in global aviation, as Emirates joins a growing roster of international carriers increasing capacity, deepening partnerships and launching new routes that funnel more visitors into one of the world’s fastest‑growing travel markets. From full‑service giants such as Emirates, Qatar Airways, Japan Airlines and United to value carriers like Saudi Arabia’s flyadeal, airlines are using India’s new bilateral openness and surging outbound demand to redraw long‑haul connectivity for tourists, business travelers and the Indian diaspora.

Emirates Signals Renewed Growth in a Crucial Market

Dubai‑based Emirates, long one of the largest foreign carriers in India, is once again talking openly about adding seats and potentially more Indian points, after more than a decade in which strict bilateral limits kept its capacity largely frozen. Speaking on the sidelines of the Dubai Airshow in November 2025, Emirates chairman and chief executive Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum said the airline was “happy” to add more seats into Indian cities and welcomed signs that Indian authorities were starting to release additional capacity under the bilateral air services agreement.

The carrier already serves a wide arc of Indian destinations, including major metros such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata, as well as high‑volume secondary cities like Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram. For years, that network has functioned as a bridge for Indian travelers heading to Europe, North America, Africa and Latin America via Dubai. Any meaningful relaxation of seat caps between India and the United Arab Emirates would allow Emirates to upgauge aircraft or add frequencies on trunk routes, easing chronic pressure on fares and peak‑season availability.

For India, the Emirates strategy dovetails with policy goals to boost foreign tourist arrivals and speed up business travel. More capacity on existing routes tends to translate into more competitive fares, shorter connection times and higher reliability, all of which are essential as Indian states invest heavily in tourism infrastructure. For Emirates, additional India rights promise a deeper traffic base for its global hub, supporting new long‑haul routes and helping the airline defend its position against fast‑growing competitors in the Gulf and South Asia.

United and Other U.S. Carriers Tap India’s Long‑Haul Potential

Across the Atlantic, United Airlines has been steadily building out a globe‑spanning network that already includes multiple Indian gateways and which increasingly relies on India for connecting flows between North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. While United’s headline announcement in 2025 focused on its planned return to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in partnership with JetBlue, the strategy behind that expansion also underlines how India fits into a broader transpacific and transatlantic web of connections.

United today operates one of the largest India footprints among U.S. airlines, serving cities such as Delhi and Mumbai directly from its hubs. From those points, Indian travelers can connect via partner carriers deeper into the domestic United States and onward to Latin America. As the airline ramps up new routes from San Francisco to Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City and Adelaide, its Asian hubs also become more useful to Indian passengers who are increasingly pairing multi‑stop itineraries across the Pacific with visits to friends and relatives in North America.

The renewed access to JFK, scheduled from 2027 under the “Blue Sky” alliance with JetBlue, further multiplies connection options, especially for high‑yield corporate travelers who favor New York’s primary international gateway. With JetBlue providing an extensive short‑haul network and United bringing long‑haul capacity and a large loyalty base, travelers from India will see more one‑stop options into the U.S. northeast and beyond, often on single‑ticket itineraries with integrated frequent‑flyer benefits.

Behind these network moves is a simple commercial reality: India’s outbound long‑haul segment is growing far faster than most mature markets, powered by rising incomes, a tech‑savvy middle class and strong diaspora ties. For U.S. carriers like United, building scale in India is no longer optional; it is increasingly central to maintaining relevance in global premium traffic flows.

Japan Airlines is the latest full‑service Asian carrier to significantly expand its India offering, with a new nonstop Delhi–Tokyo Narita service set to begin on 17 January 2026. The route, announced in October 2025, will operate alongside existing Delhi–Haneda and Bengaluru–Narita services, giving JAL three distinct Japan–India city pairs and cementing Tokyo’s role as a key Northeast Asian gateway for Indian travelers.

The timing is deliberate. Travel demand between India, Japan and North America has climbed sharply in recent years, driven by technology partnerships, manufacturing investments and growing tourism flows in both directions. By adding a second daily Delhi–Tokyo link via Narita, JAL can better synchronize arrivals with its bank of transpacific departures to cities in the United States and Canada, providing smoother one‑stop itineraries between India and North America.

The airline is also leveraging a deepening partnership with IndiGo, India’s largest carrier, through codeshares that extend JAL’s reach across India’s domestic network. Under these agreements, passengers can buy a single ticket that combines a JAL long‑haul service with an IndiGo domestic connection, handling baggage through‑checked and schedule coordinated. This kind of seamless connectivity is particularly attractive to Japanese investors and tourists heading beyond India’s metro cities to emerging industrial hubs and leisure destinations.

For Indian travelers, the reinforced JAL presence adds choice in a segment long dominated by Gulf carriers. It offers a non‑Gulf alternative for one‑stop travel to North America and provides a more direct link to Japanese destinations, backed by JAL’s extensive domestic network that covers more than 60 airports across Japan. The strategy underscores how legacy Asian airlines see India as a springboard for broader network development rather than just a point‑to‑point market.

Flyadeal’s India Entry Opens a New Low‑Cost Corridor

At the other end of the market spectrum, Saudi Arabia’s low‑cost carrier flyadeal is preparing a major push into India from early 2026. The airline has confirmed plans to launch services from Jeddah and Riyadh to Mumbai and Delhi in the first quarter of that year, followed by additional Indian cities through the remainder of 2026, subject to aircraft availability and regulatory approvals.

Flyadeal, the budget sister airline of Saudia, is positioning its India growth within Saudi Arabia’s broader Vision 2030 strategy, which aims to transform the kingdom into a global tourism and transit hub. The carrier currently operates a fleet dominated by Airbus A320 family jets and is on track to expand to about 100 aircraft and more than 100 destinations by the end of the decade. India is central to that roadmap, not only because of the large expatriate Indian community in Saudi Arabia but also due to rapidly increasing leisure and religious tourism flows in both directions.

The airline’s chief executive, Steven Greenway, has described India as one of the most “hyper‑competitive” aviation markets in the world, arguing that success will require relentless attention to unit costs and a carefully calibrated rollout. To that end, flyadeal is pursuing a potential codeshare or interline partnership with an Indian carrier, which would allow passengers to connect seamlessly beyond Mumbai and Delhi to secondary cities while keeping fares sharply competitive.

For Indian travelers, flyadeal’s arrival promises fresh low‑cost options for trips to Saudi Arabia and, over time, to a wider network across the Middle East and beyond as the airline’s long‑haul fleet grows. For India’s airports and tourism stakeholders, it represents another strand in a broader tapestry of new carriers using India as both origin and destination, intensifying competition and potentially pulling down average fares on short and medium‑haul international routes.

Qatar Airways and Gulf Competitors Defend Their India Strongholds

Qatar Airways, like Emirates, has long treated India as a cornerstone of its global network, with a dense schedule linking Doha to major Indian metros and key secondary cities. While recent headlines have focused more on aircraft orders and new premium cabin products, the underlying strategy remains unchanged: maintain high frequencies across the India network and use Doha’s hub to funnel traffic onward to Europe, the Americas and Africa.

In practice, this means continued jockeying for capacity and market share among the big Gulf carriers. Emirates, Qatar Airways and others, including Etihad and the fast‑growing Saudi group, are all lobbying for more India rights as the country’s outbound traffic expands. Where bilaterals have not yet been liberalized, they are turning to upgauging, schedule optimization and partnerships with Indian carriers to squeeze more value out of existing entitlements.

From the traveler’s perspective, the competition manifests as more choices in timings, aircraft and price points for popular one‑stop itineraries to Europe and North America. It also nudges airlines to enhance soft‑product offerings aimed at Indian passengers, from tailored meal options to language support and improved ground handling in Indian cities. For India’s tourism industry, the intense Gulf rivalry helps keep capacity flowing even during off‑peak seasons, supporting inbound visitor numbers from high‑spend markets such as the United Kingdom, continental Europe and the United States.

These dynamics are likely to intensify as Saudi Arabia’s new carriers, including flyadeal and Riyadh Air, expand. For India, that sets the stage for a multi‑hub environment in the Gulf, where Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh all compete to serve as the preferred transit point for Indian travelers, further knitting the region into India’s tourism and business travel ecosystem.

India’s Domestic Giants Extend International Reach through Partnerships

While foreign airlines ramp up India services, homegrown carriers are not standing still. IndiGo, which commands more than half of India’s domestic market, has been aggressively building its own international footprint and supplementing it with a growing web of codeshare agreements. Among the most recent is a partnership with Australian low‑cost group Jetstar, announced in mid‑2025, which allows IndiGo to place its code on Jetstar routes across Australia and New Zealand via transit points such as Singapore, Bangkok and Phuket.

This arrangement significantly expands the one‑stop options available to Indian leisure travelers bound for the Pacific region and gives inbound visitors from Australia and New Zealand easier access to Indian cities beyond the primary gateways. Combined with codeshares involving carriers like Japan Airlines and several Middle Eastern airlines, IndiGo is transforming itself from a purely domestic player into a key connector in India’s international network, while still operating a single‑class low‑cost model.

Air India, under the Tata Group’s ownership, is simultaneously pursuing an ambitious transformation that includes new aircraft, upgraded cabins and expanded international schedules aimed at recapturing premium traffic that had migrated to foreign competitors. The flag carrier is boosting capacity on long‑haul routes to markets such as Tokyo, Toronto, London and Melbourne, while also signaling interest in strengthening its North America and Southeast Asia networks. For inbound tourists, this creates more non‑stop options into India on an Indian airline, which can be a deciding factor for travelers seeking familiar cuisine, language and cultural cues on board.

Together, these moves by IndiGo, Air India and other Indian carriers complement the influx of foreign capacity. They help ensure that increased international seats translate into meaningful connectivity beyond Delhi and Mumbai, spreading tourism benefits to second‑tier cities and emerging destinations that depend heavily on air access for growth.

Regulatory Shifts and Infrastructure Investments Enable the New Era

Underlying the recent wave of airline announcements is a policy and infrastructure backdrop that is evolving nearly as fast as the traffic. Indian authorities have been steadily renegotiating bilateral air service agreements, experimenting with limited capacity increases, and using airport privatization and greenfield projects to add runway and terminal capacity in major metros and regional centers.

The government’s goal is to position India as both a leading origin market and an attractive destination for international visitors, aligning with broader economic strategies that prioritize tourism, manufacturing and services exports. New and expanded airports in cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Goa are designed to handle significantly higher passenger volumes, with modern transfer facilities that make one‑stop itineraries more appealing to foreign carriers looking at Indian hubs.

At the same time, regulators are managing growing pains. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation and the Ministry of Civil Aviation have had to respond to operational crises, including large‑scale schedule disruptions at major Indian airlines, while pushing for higher safety and reliability standards. The effort to balance consumer protection with rapid capacity growth is shaping how quickly new routes can be launched and how confidently foreign airlines can plan multi‑year investments in India‑related traffic.

For carriers like Emirates, United, Japan Airlines, flyadeal, Qatar Airways and their peers, the trajectory remains clear despite near‑term constraints. India’s combination of demographic heft, economic momentum and evolving aviation policy makes it one of the most critical battlegrounds for global network airlines. As they add flights, deepen partnerships and refine hubs around Indian passenger flows, international visitors are finding it easier than ever to reach the country’s major cities and, increasingly, its emerging destinations beyond the well‑trodden tourist trail.