Celebration ceremony of the successful Delhi-Guangzhou inaugural flight in Guangzhou, South China’s Guangdong Province, on November 11, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of IndiGo
On Tuesday morning, IndiGo flight 6E 1701 arrived in Guangzhou from Delhi, marking the carrier’s second route to China in the past month, a step that is believed to further strengthen travel options and encourage economic and cultural exchanges between the two countries.
This follows the resumption of its Kolkata-Guangzhou service on October 26, which made IndiGo the first Indian airline to restart direct flights to the Chinese mainland after a five-year hiatus.
This new route will further strengthen direct connectivity between the two nations by connecting the Indian capital and a key aviation hub of the region, Delhi, with Guangzhou – a major business and manufacturing center in South China, the company said in a release sent to the Global Times on Tuesday.
IndiGo has demonstrated its ability to launch new routes rapidly, as seen with the previous Kolkata-Guangzhou service, said Pieter Elbers, CEO of IndiGo, in an exclusive interview with the Global Times in Guangzhou.
“Clearly we have ambitions to further grow and further develop since one-third of the world’s population is living in India and China together, for we have more direct air connectivity between these two huge populations,” he said.
“I think it’s an opportunity not to be missed,” he said.
Pieter Elbers, CEO of IndiGo Photo: Courtesy of IndiGo
When asked how the carrier made preparations for the Kolkata-Guangzhou route, Elbers said “that of the respective countries met and made the announcement that flights would be resumed. Immediately at IndiGo, we moved into an action mode, and we decided what we should do in terms of market preparation, flight preparation, route preparation … making sure that we get all the permits and approvals and slots and everything.”
It took us about two or three months to make full preparations, he said.
On October 9, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said that China and India would resume direct flights before the end of this month.
This is the latest result as the two sides earnestly implement the important consensus reached between the two leaders during their meeting in Tianjin on August 31, according to Guo.
It is also a positive move to facilitate friendly exchanges between the Chinese and Indian peoples, totaling more than 2.8 billion, Guo added.
Elbers said that the flight from Kolkata to Guangzhou has been extremely full, almost 100 percent for almost every flight, and there was a lot of demand. People were actually eagerly waiting the resumption of flights, for customers were traveling via other points, either Hong Kong or the Middle East or even other places in Asia like Singapore or Bangkok, to make connections between the Chinese mainland and India.
China has remained India’s largest trading partner for many years. According to data from China’s General Administration of Customs, bilateral trade reached $138.478 billion in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 1.7 percent.
The potential of the market has attracted more players.
At 1:02 pm on Sunday, China Eastern Airlines flight MU563, carrying 248 passengers, departed from Shanghai Pudong International Airport bound for Delhi, India.
China Eastern said that it plans to increase flight frequency based on market feedback and also aims to resume the Kunming-Kolkata route and launch a new Shanghai Pudong-Mumbai route, further expanding air links between China and India.
When asked about competition, Elbers showed his confidence related to the market size of the two countries, as the reality is that one-third of the world’s population is living in these two countries. China is the second-largest economy in the world, and India is the fourth, so “there’s room for a lot of flights and a lot of operators,” he said.
He also expressed his ambition for the Chinese market, revealing that the airline is evaluating operations from additional Indian cities to more Chinese destinations.
If you look at the size of the larger cities outside Beijing and Shanghai, there’s quite a few like Chengdu, Kunming, Xiamen and Hangzhou. So if you look at all these different cities, I think there’s opportunities out there, he said.
