Pan-India delivery for corporate gifting is straightforward for most of the year, but festival season is a genuinely different logistics environment, and treating it the same way leads to missed dates.
Courier networks nationally see their heaviest volume of the year in the weeks before Diwali, which means transit times that are normally two to three days can stretch meaningfully longer, particularly to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Building in extra buffer for non-metro deliveries isn't optional during this window — it's the single biggest variable in whether gifts arrive on time.
The practical fix is working backward from your actual required delivery date, not your order date. If gifts need to be with employees or clients by a specific day, your dispatch needs to happen well before the typical lead time would suggest, precisely because typical lead times don't hold during peak season.
For very large or geographically spread orders, ask whether your vendor can dispatch from multiple regional hubs rather than a single origin point — it meaningfully reduces the load on any one courier route during the peak window.