Fly By Night

With 10 five-star hotels, luxury bars and restaurants, Delhi’s Aerocity has turned from an airport zone into the city’s hottest new nightlife destination

- Suman Tarafdar

In a city as massive as Delhi—about 20 million people and counting— an airport-adjacent complex is not expected to be a popular evening hangout. But then the city has a way of confounding folks. Aerocity, for the past year or so, has recorded the highest room occupancy rates for any micro-market in Delhi.

With 10 operational hotels and the 11th just about to open, the room inventory in Aerocity tops 4,000. All of them are business hotels, catering largely to executives and, well, airline crews, who need spaces to relax post work. Not a surprise then that most of the hotels have a number of bars, many doubling as nightclubs and entertainment centres, often quite the busiest sections of the hotel. Even long-stay guests—and there are quite a few—could go bar-hopping without ever leaving Aerocity. While Aerocity is walkable, swish limos (rentals of course) are the usual way to drive up these grid-layout boulevards.