Airport
Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Airport (BOM)
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj is wedged into the middle of the city it serves, and that explains almost everything unusual about it: two terminals facing away from each other, an airfield with no room to grow, and a road network that decides how long your transfer takes. It is the country's second gateway and the principal one for the west. Arriving in Mumbai rewards travellers who read the ticket closely, because the terminal letter — and the airport code itself — are both things you can get wrong.
Updated 2026-09-22
- CodesBOM · VABB
- Elevation11 m
- ServesMumbai
- Official websitecsmia.adaniairports.com
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T1 and T2 are two separate airports
T2 is the international building and also carries much of the domestic schedule. T1, around the airfield in another suburb, is the domestic terminal for the low-cost carriers. There is no airside link between them and no walkway: changing terminals means leaving one building, travelling by road around the perimeter and entering the other from the street like any other passenger.
That one fact governs Mumbai connections. A shuttle runs for transferring passengers, but a terminal change still costs a city drive, a fresh security check and a new bag drop, and your luggage travels with you unless the whole journey sits on one ticket. Confirm which terminal each leg uses before you book something tight, not after.
One runway, and what it does to the schedule
Two runways cross here and only one can be used at a time, which makes this one of the busiest single-runway operations anywhere. Slots are scarce, the day is planned to the edge of what the airfield can absorb, and a delay that starts in the morning is still visible on the evening boards. No amount of terminal capacity changes it, because the constraint is the ground itself.
The monsoon sharpens the effect: in the wet months the city floods, aircraft hold and the recovery takes hours the schedule does not have. The unglamorous responses are the ones that work — fly earlier in the day where the timetable allows, avoid the last connection of the evening, and treat a same-day onward flight on a separate ticket as a risk you are choosing rather than a plan.
Into the city: the metro runs under the terminals
The most useful change here happened underground. Mumbai's first deep-level metro line passes beneath the airport with a station at each terminal and runs south through the business districts toward the tip of the island city — the one link that ignores the traffic entirely. Northbound it joins the rest of the metro network; southward it runs down into the island city, where the mainline termini of Indian rail travel sit.
At ground level the choice is the prepaid counter in the arrivals hall, which issues a paid-in-advance slip you hand to a waiting driver, or the app pickup zones out in the forecourt. Orientation matters more than the method: the airport sits between the western suburbs and the old city, so where you are staying shapes the transfer far more than which service you take.
Arrivals, customs and self-connections
International flights land at T2, where the passport queue comes before the baggage hall. Almost nobody boards without a visa already granted, and India's entry rules are where that question is settled. Customs splits into red and green channels and ordinary luggage takes the green one, though the national ban on vaping devices still catches travellers out at the belt.
If the onward domestic flight sits on a separate booking, you are self-connecting: clear customs with your bags, leave the building and walk round to the departures entrance, where a ticket is checked before anyone is allowed inside. Add the road transfer if that leg uses T1, and the comfortable minimum becomes several hours rather than the tight gap that looked fine when you booked.
Onward: the region's second airport and the routes south
Mumbai is no longer the only airport in its own metropolitan region. A second international airport has opened on the mainland side of the harbour and airlines have begun moving flights across to it, which makes the three-letter code on your ticket a thing to check rather than assume — the two are separated by the width of the bay, and nobody hops between them casually.
From here the west and the south open up: the short coastal hops toward Goa and the Konkan, the long domestic legs to the far south, and the Gulf departures that fill the small hours. Rental counters and chauffeur pickups are grouped on the arrivals level, while the long-distance trains leave from the city's own termini rather than from the airport.
Layovers: hotels, the art walk and the wet season
Hotels cluster tightly around the airfield in the surrounding suburbs, most of them running their own shuttles, which makes a short overnight stop practical even when the roads are bad. Inside T2 there are lounges and rest facilities airside; landside, left luggage is what turns a long layover into something you can use rather than sit through.
T2 is also the rare terminal worth arriving early for. Its departure levels carry a permanent public art collection built into the walls and ceilings — a gallery you walk through rather than visit — and the food court is a fair cross-section of what the city eats. In the wet season, those airside hours pass more pleasantly than the road ever would.