Hub-and-Spoke vs Point-to-Point

Imagine two completely different ways an airline could design its entire route map, one funnels passengers from many smaller cities into one or two central hub airports, where they connect onto flights to their final destination, the other tries to fly as many direct routes as possible between individual city pairs, even if the total passenger volume on any single route is comparatively modest. Hub-and-spoke and point-to-point are exactly these two competing network philosophies, and most airlines lean meaningfully toward one or the other.

The hub-and-spoke model, historically favoured by full-service legacy carriers, lets an airline offer connections to a huge number of destination pairs without needing enough direct demand to fill a plane on every single route, a passenger from a smaller city can connect through the hub to reach almost anywhere the airline flies, even if there's no direct demand for that specific smaller-city-to-final-destination route.

Point-to-point, the model low-cost carriers like IndiGo lean into much more heavily, covered elsewhere on this site, prioritises direct flights between city pairs with genuine standalone demand, trading network breadth for faster, more convenient journeys on the routes it does serve, and simpler, more efficient aircraft utilisation since planes aren't waiting around to synchronise connections the way hub operations often require.

India's own aviation geography has shaped a genuinely hybrid outcome, Delhi and Mumbai function as de facto domestic hubs by sheer size and connectivity even for carriers that otherwise favour point-to-point flying, while UDAN's regional connectivity push, covered elsewhere on this site, is deliberately trying to build enough direct point-to-point demand between smaller cities that passengers don't always need to route through Delhi or Mumbai just to reach a neighbouring state.