SriLankan Airlines from Australia | Colombo, South India and Fares

The small airline with the useful network

Nobody in Australia thinks about SriLankan Airlines, and that is a shame, because for one specific and quite large group of travellers it is the best answer available.

That group is anyone going to south India.

Look at where Colombo sits. It is a short hop from Chennai, Kochi, Trivandrum, Madurai and Bengaluru, and SriLankan flies to more of south India than almost any carrier outside India itself. If your family is in Kerala or Tamil Nadu, this routing is not a curiosity. It is the sensible one. Ask us to price a Colombo routing.

Why Colombo beats the Gulf for south India

Every one of our Gulf airline pages says the same thing, so let us say the corollary here.

Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi are west of India. Flying Sydney to the Gulf to Kochi means going past Kochi and coming back, and the second leg is a proper flight in its own right. It works, and it is frequently the fare answer, and our Emirates and Qatar Airways pages set out when.

The other common answer is to fly to Delhi or Mumbai and take a domestic connection south. That adds a domestic leg, and at Mumbai it adds a terminal change between separate buildings, which is a real journey with real traffic in it.

Colombo does neither. It is close to south India, the second leg is short, and the whole thing sits on one ticket with the baggage checked through. For a family flying to Kochi with three suitcases and a grandmother, that is not a marginal improvement.

Our flights to Sri Lanka page covers the corridor and our Sydney to Kochi and Sydney to Chennai pages go through the routings for those cities specifically.

The 3am problem, and the fix

This is the thing to know before you book a hotel, and it applies whether you are going to Sri Lanka or through it.

Flights into Colombo frequently land somewhere between two and five in the morning. That is not bad luck; it is a consequence of how the network is built to connect with the onward bank of flights.

So: book your room from the night before. Not from the morning you land. A hotel room booked for "Tuesday" starts on Tuesday afternoon, and you are landing at 3am on Tuesday, which means either a lobby or a very expensive nap.

The second half of the fix is where. Negombo is about ten minutes from the airport. Colombo is about an hour. If you land at 3am and your hotel is in Colombo, you have added an hour of driving to the worst part of an already long journey.

So the Sri Lanka pattern that works is: land, sleep in Negombo, start the trip properly in the morning, and give Colombo one day at the end when you have earned a good dinner. Our Colombo guide argues this at length and our things to do in Colombo page is blunt about the city being a one-day proposition.

The airline itself, honestly

Small, warm, unpretentious.

The hard product is decent. Business class is a proper long-haul cabin on the widebodies and the regional hops into India are what a two-hour flight is. The lounge at Colombo is fine. Nobody is going to write a magazine feature about the seat.

What people mention, consistently, is the crew. Sri Lankan hospitality is not a marketing construct and it survives contact with a long night flight. If you have flown a Gulf carrier where everything is impeccable and slightly impersonal, this is the other thing.

The airline has had a well-documented commercial history and it operates in a country that has been through a great deal. What that means practically is that the network and the schedule move around more than most, which is precisely why we check what is genuinely flying on your dates rather than telling you what flew last year.

The Oneworld thing, which nobody knows

SriLankan Airlines is in Oneworld. So is Qantas.

For an airline this size, that is a disproportionately useful fact, and hardly any Australian is aware of it. Your Qantas status works: lounge access, priority boarding, priority baggage. The flights earn Qantas points and status credits.

So you can take the small, cheap, geographically sensible routing to south India and still be treated as the Qantas frequent flyer you are. That is a genuinely good deal and it appears on no comparison website, because comparison websites do not know about your status.

Tell us your programme and number when you request a quote and we will keep it working, and check that the fare class earns what you assume. The cheap ones often do not.

Sri Lanka is the other reason

If the destination is Sri Lanka rather than India, the airline is obviously the incumbent, and the country deserves more Australian attention than it gets.

The short version: it is a small island with an implausible amount in it. A rock fortress you climb. A cultural triangle of ancient cities. Tea country and one of the world's great train journeys through it. Two coasts with two opposite monsoons, which means somewhere on the island is almost always dry. Leopards. Whales. And food that is nothing like the Indian food Australians think they know.

Ten to fourteen days does the classic loop comfortably. A week does a compressed version. The distances look small and take longer than the map suggests, because the roads are what they are.

The two-monsoon fact is the genuinely useful planning tool: December to March favours the west and south coasts, and May to September favours the east. There is no bad time to go to Sri Lanka, only bad combinations of time and coast.

When we recommend SriLankan, and when we do not

We recommend it when your destination is south India, when you are going to Sri Lanka, when you hold Qantas status and want it to work on a small carrier, and when the fare comes in below the Gulf routings, which it frequently does.

We do not recommend it when your destination is north India, because Delhi via Colombo makes no more sense than Delhi via anywhere else that is not on the way. We do not recommend it when the schedule on your dates produces a punishing connection, which happens on a network this size. And we will tell you honestly when a Gulf carrier or Malaysia Airlines has simply priced better on your particular week.

The value of an agent on a carrier like this one is not the discount. It is that we will put it in the comparison at all, and check whether the schedule on your specific dates makes it a clever routing or an ordeal.

Send us your dates and where in India or Sri Lanka you are actually going, and we will price Colombo against everything else, side by side, in Australian dollars. Get a free SriLankan Airlines quote.