Six Years Later, Guangzhou Remembers Delhi Exists

China Southern Airlines will resume daily nonstop flights between Guangzhou and Delhi on 21 September 2026, restoring a link that has been dark since February 2020. Tickets are already on sale. Flight CZ359 leaves Guangzhou at 15:35 and reaches Delhi at 19:00; the return CZ360 departs Delhi at 20:00 and lands back in Guangzhou at 04:15 the following morning. The route is expected to be flown with Boeing 737-8 aircraft, a narrowbody choice that says something about how cautiously the carrier is re-entering a market it once served with far more confidence.

China Southern is the third mainland Chinese carrier back into India, and the sequencing tells the story of a relationship thawing in slow, deliberate increments. China Eastern went first with Shanghai–Delhi, Air China followed with Beijing–Delhi, and Guangzhou — the southern hub that historically carried the bulk of China–India traffic — is only now rejoining. Direct services between the two countries collapsed in 2020 and stayed collapsed through years in which passengers were routed through Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok or the Gulf, usually adding six to ten hours to a journey between two capitals barely five hours apart.

For travellers the immediate gain is time and price. A Delhi–Guangzhou itinerary that has required a connection since 2020 becomes a single sector of roughly five and a half hours, and the reappearance of a third competitor on the China–India market should put downward pressure on fares that have been unusually high precisely because nothing flew nonstop. Guangzhou’s value is also as a gateway rather than a destination: China Southern’s Baiyun hub feeds a dense domestic network plus onward services across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, which makes the route useful well beyond people whose business is actually in Guangdong.

The wider significance is that this is now a trend rather than an isolated gesture. Three mainland carriers flying to Delhi within a single year, with Indian carriers moving in the other direction, suggests the two aviation authorities have settled whatever needed settling. Anyone with reason to travel between the two countries should treat the coming schedule season as the first in six years worth actually shopping — the options are multiplying faster than the fare data has caught up with.

Sources: Travel Trends Today, Travel Trade Journal