Delhi’s luxury hotel pricing hits new peak during AI Summit; rates skyrocket to Rs 30,00,000

If you assumed a Delhi five-star stay peaks at “some thousand a night”, the week of the India–AI Impact Summit 2026 is dismantling that intuition in real time.

On Tuesday morning, a quick scan of bookings of Delhi’s hotel websites threw up numbers that usually belong to once-a-year calendar moments, except this wasn’t New Year’s Eve or a big wedding weekend.

One night in a five-star hotel in the capital was crossing Rs 10 lakh, and the jump was being driven by a very specific rush: the city is preparing to host the India–AI Impact Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam between February 16 and 20, an event expected to bring foreign delegates, policymakers, tech leaders and speakers to Delhi.

That surge is now visible not just on online travel portals, but also in direct pricing on hotel websites, where the gap between a “normal” late-February night and a summit-week night looks less like an incremental hike and more like a hard reset.

What the numbers show: a week apart, the prices don’t even look related

To understand the scale, here is a simple comparison of February 18–19 (summit week) versus February 25–26 (a week later). The pattern is consistent across brands: the closer the stay is to summit dates, the more aggressively inventory is priced—especially in suites.

1) Taj Palace, Delhi (direct website pricing)

• Deluxe Room Twin Bed Diplomatic Enclave View: Rs 30,000 (Feb 25–26) vs Rs 60,500 (Feb 18–19)

• Garden Presidential 2 Bed Suite Pool View: Rs 3,20,000 (Feb 25–26) vs Rs 30,00,000 (Feb 18–19)

• Garden Luxury Suite King Bed Pool View with Private Terrace: Rs 1,70,000 (Feb 25–26) vs Rs 25,00,000 (Feb 18–19)

Even within the same hotel, the “entry” five-star room roughly doubles, while the flagship suites blow past what most travellers consider imaginable for a single night.

2) The Leela Palace, New Delhi (direct website pricing)

• Luxury Suite: Rs 1,80,500 (Feb 25–26) vs Rs 17,30,500 (Feb 18–19)

• Cheapest room available:

  • Premier Room: Rs 51,230 (Feb 25–26)

  • Run Of The House: Rs 3,79,700 (Feb 18–19)

• Run Of The House: Rs 64,560 (Feb 25–26) vs Rs 3,79,700 (Feb 18–19)

This is where the pricing story turns especially revealing: even the cheapest available category during the summit window becomes a different product, priced for scarcity rather than for “luxury value”.

3) The Oberoi, New Delhi (direct website pricing)

• Room Assigned on Arrival: Rs 85,000 (Feb 25–26) vs Rs 5,50,000 (Feb 18–19)

• Luxury Suite: Rs 4,00,000 (Feb 25–26) vs Rs 25,00,000 (Feb 18–19)

Across these three hotels, the summit-window rates move into seven figures for top categories, while the same properties, a week later, revert to pricing that still signals luxury, but sits in an entirely different band.

Portals are showing the same demand shock, just through different listings

MakeMyTrip’s Tuesday morning snapshot (around 9 am) for February 15–16 added another layer: prices were already surging even before the summit officially begins on Feb 16.

• At The Imperial, New Delhi, a luxury suite with a bathtub was listed at a total payable amount of around Rs 11.64 lakh for one night, including taxes.

• A room at The Oberoi, New Delhi was costing about Rs 5.84 lakh for the night.

• A Maharaja Suite at The Leela Palace was priced at roughly Rs 7.34 lakh, while a garden presidential suite at Taj Palace was close to Rs 4 lakh.

• Even Le Meridien was nearing Rs 90,000 for one night.

The exact room categories and dates differ from your direct-website comparisons (Feb 18–19 vs Feb 15–16), but the direction is unmistakable: as soon as summit-linked demand starts compressing availability in central Delhi’s premium inventory, the price curve steepens fast.

Why this is happening: it’s not “AI hype”, it’s event economics

The immediate trigger is straightforward: a short, high-profile window is pulling in international and institutional travellers who prioritise proximity, security, predictability, and brand assurance—and are often booking on organisational budgets.

That mix creates a perfect storm for luxury pricing:

• Sudden demand concentration: When large numbers of delegates arrive in a tight window, hotel demand doesn’t rise gradually; it spikes.

• Limited top-end inventory: Delhi’s true “ultra-luxury” room supply is finite. When the top layer gets blocked early, the remaining rooms get repriced upward quickly.

• Yield management in action: Five-star hotels don’t price like airlines, but they use a similar logic—high-demand nights are priced to maximise revenue per available room, not to maintain a stable average.

• Suite scarcity as a pricing lever: The steepest jumps are consistently in suites, where there are fewer keys and where hotels know demand from senior delegations can be relatively price-insensitive.

The travel industry has been blunt about the summit linkage. Aloke Bajpai, chief executive of Ixigo, wrote on X: “The India AI Impact Summit has surely impacted hotel rates in Delhi NCR. Several 5-star hotels in Delhi are going at 1 Lakh+ per night between 16-20 Feb,” Bajpai said in a post on X.

What it means for travellers: avoid the dates, or move outward

For regular travellers, the practical takeaway is simple: if you’re trying to stay in central Delhi around Feb 16–20, the city is temporarily not a “normal” market. Planning around the summit dates or looking beyond the most premium clusters becomes the only realistic way to avoid the surge.