The Best Credit Card in India for Travel Bookings

Update 31 Mar 2023: Immediately after we published this post, SBI Card announced revised terms for the CASHBACK SBI Card. The monthly cashback cap on online spending has been reduced to ₹5,000, domestic lounge benefit has been eliminated and a number of categories of spending, including Railway tickets have been excluded from earning cashback. We will be updating this and our other relevant posts with the new terms soon. We expect that the CASHBACK SBI Card will no longer be a top pick for Travel after these changes. 

The Bottom Line

We think the CASHBACK SBI Card is the best card in India for domestic flight and hotel bookings for most people.

It provides 5% cashback on all online transactions (incl. flights and hotels via travel websites) with a monthly cap of ₹10,000 in cashback.

The CASHBACK has a low annual fee of ₹999, which is waived in the first year and can be waived in subsequent years on charging more than ₹2 lacs to the card each year.

For high value & international bookings, especially for families, we think the Magnus or ATLAS Credit Cards from Axis Bank are the best option for most people.

Both these cards provide unlimited rewards (5% reward rate for ATLAS and 6% for Magnus) on travel bookings via the Axis Bank TRAVEL EDGE portal. The ATLAS also provides rewards for direct bookings on airline and hotel websites.

In our testing, we sometimes found ticket and hotel prices on the TRAVEL EDGE portal to be slightly higher that on travel websites like MakeMyTrip and Yatra.com. Occasionally we also found some flights missing.

This can result, in some cases, in a slightly higher all-in cost when booking from the TRAVEL EDGE portal.

How both, the Magnus and the ATLAS, offer highly favorable rates for converting their reward points into frequent flyer miles at Axis Bank’s partner airlines and hotels.

After this conversion, your effective reward rate on these cards may be as high as 9-21%. If this method of redemption works for you, you should book via TRAVEL EDGE even if the prices are slightly higher.

A number of credit cards offer coupon codes for 10-25% discounts on various travel websites e.g. the DigiSmart from Standard Chartered offers 25% off on hotel bookings and 20% off on domestic flight bookings via Yatra.com.

However, most travel websites offer coupon codes that provide a slightly lower discounts to all customers anyway.

We think combining the 5% cashback from the CASHBACK SBI Card with these generic coupons leads to a better outcome in most cases than relying on coupon codes specific to cards like the DigiSmart.

Table 1: Recommended Reward Redemption Options

Everything we recommend

Who this is for

Credit card acceptance in India can be patchy as not all merchants are set up to swipe. However all travel websites, hotels and airlines accept cards for payment, making travel bookings a major use case for credit cards.

If you are a travel bug, taking multiple trips a year, maybe with your whole family, maybe even the occasional visit overseas, it may be worthwhile to consider a dedicated credit card for flight and hotel bookings.

In this post, we recommend credit cards that maximize your rewards on travel bookings without costing you a bomb in annual fees.

If you are looking for a card to use while overseas, for day to day expenses at the destination, see our post on the best card for FX transactions.

Most people who are not regular travelers, would be better off choosing the best credit cards in India for all their monthly spending level – those are the RBL Bank Monthly Treats for entry level, the ACE Credit Card from Axis Bank for monthly spending between ₹10,000 – 1 lacs and the Magnus Credit Card, also from Axis Bank for monthly spending above ₹1 lacs a month.

That would be a more convenient way to earn higher rewards, rather than choosing a card just for travel bookings.

How we selected

Banks in India offer more than 400 credit cards, most of which do not offer any special rewards on flight and hotel bookings. That means you are stuck collecting the base reward rate for your card when you charge these bills to your card.

Travel expenses are also often big ticket items, especially for families and overseas travel, running in to thousands or even lacs of rupees for each trip. This has a few implications.

First, you can earn a lot of rewards on these transactions and if you are a regular traveler it makes sense to optimize your card strategy for these transactions even if you are not a reward junkie otherwise.

Second, travel expenses are often concentrated in a couple of months in a year. So cards with lower reward rates but unlimited rewards may be better than cards with higher reward rates that cap the rewards you can collect in a month or on a single transaction.

Third, because these expenses can be so large, it may make sense to get a credit card just for travel bookings. You may be able to get the annual fee waived even with just a couple of trips in a year.

To find the best credit cards for travel bookings, we looked through the terms and conditions of all the credit cards offered by 15 major banks in India and shortlisted 9 cards that offered at least a 5% reward on flight & hotel bookings.

Table 2: Shortlist of Best Credit Cards for Travel Bookings

However, each of these cards have different charges and reward structures, which means picking the best isn’t as simple as picking the one with the highest promised rewards for travel bookings.

Most of these cards have different annual fees that must be paid if you do not charge a specific minimum amount to the card in a year. If the annual fee is not waived, it will eat into your rewards.

Many cards also have a cap on the rewards you can earn, either in total or just for travel bookings. Some cards have other restrictions e.g. rewards only available on Yatra.com (SC DigiSmart) or on their own rewards portal (Axis Magnus).

Some cards only allow for high rewards on a set number of transactions every quarter or month.

To select the best card for travel bookings, we simulated the rewards earned on each card by a family of 4, traveling twice in a year. In total we tested 24 scenarios – a combination of 6 levels of flight & train fares and 4 levels of hotel charges for a 4 day domestic or international trip.

We modeled all the factors above in our simulation i.e. annual fee, potential fee waivers, reward rates & reward caps etc.

Table 3: Flight Fares Tested in Reward Simulation

Table 4: Hotel Daily Rates Tested in Reward Simulation

In our simulation we also made a few adjustments.

For example, many travel websites already offer meaningful discounts to all customers by default e.g. ClearTrip had a coupon code for up to a 15% discount available on all domestic flights, when we visited the website. Similar codes were available on Yatra.com and MakeMyTrip.

When evaluating credit cards that offered coupon codes on specific websites (e.g. SC DigiSmart offers 10% discount on international flights at Yatra.com, up to ₹10,000, for one transaction a quarter), we reduced the value of the coupon code by the value of the default coupon code available to every one.

So if the DigiSmart offers a 10% discount on international flights at Yatra.com but Yatra.com already offers a 5% discount to all customers, we attributed only a 5% reward rate for the DigiSmart and not the entire 10%.

We think this is fair because if you were booking those tickets with a card that offers rewards points or cashback instead of a coupon, you earn those rewards on top of the coupon discount available to everyone on the site.

On the other hand, if you use the card specific coupon code, you cannot combine it with any other coupon code offered by the travel website.

We found that in most cases, the card specific coupon code was worth only about an additional 5% discount rather than the advertised 15-25%.

Finally, we also considered the level of rewards each card offered for other spending, not just for travel. After all, if you can use a single card for everything, that saves you some hassle, which is worth something.

However, for travel bookings we put less weight on this criterion because we think travel is one category where a dedicated card can make sense for a lot of people – the additional rewards can be meaningful and its easy to know when you need to pull out that card.

In the end, we preferred cards that offered the highest reward rate on travel bookings across simulated scenarios and had no (or high) caps on those rewards.

We also gave more weight to cards that rewarded all travel spends over those that rewarded only spend on either flights or hotels, or those that rewarded spend at a specific travel website only.

Interestingly, we found that cards that are best for travel bookings are also excellent general purpose cards, meaning if you get one of these, you may not need to get another card at all. For more on this topic, see our post on the best cards in India.

The Best Credit Card for Domestic Travel Bookings

We think the CASHBACK SBI Card is the best credit card for domestic travel bookings for most people.

The CASHBACK offers 5% cashback on all online spend, including on travel, hotel and airline websites with a very high monthly cashback cap of ₹10,000.

To be clear, this means you get 5% back on the first ₹2 lacs of online spend each month and for spends beyond that amount, you still earn 1% cashback.

So, this is the best card for you if you do not expect your total online spending to exceed ₹2 lacs, even in months where you make your travel bookings.

If your monthly online spending is likely to exceed ₹2 lacs, especially in months where you make travel bookings, you should consider the cards with unlimited rewards on travel bookings. These are recommended in the next section of this post.

Remember to use the general coupon codes on travel websites when using the CASHBACK – this way the rewards from the card will be layered on top of the coupon code.

Table 5: Feature Summary – CASHBACK SBI Card

The CASHBACK has a relatively low annual fee of ₹999, which is waived for the first year and can be waived in subsequent years on crossing an annual spend of ₹2 lacs.

The Best Credit Cards for Overseas & Big Ticket Travel Bookings

Outside of some popular short-distance destinations like Dubai and Singapore, booking international flight tickets & hotels can easily blow you past the ₹10,000 monthly reward limit on the CASHBACK SBI Card.

So if you’re planning to take your family to the US or Europe, you need a card that offers unlimited rewards on travel bookings. Unlimited rewards are also useful if your domestic travel bookings costs routinely exceed ₹1-2 lacs.

Of the 9 cards we shortlisted in Table 1 above, 6 do offer unlimited rewards.

Of these, we believe the ATLAS Credit Card from Axis Bank is a great card for overseas and other big ticket travel expenses.

The ATLAS offers 5%, unlimited rewards on all bookings made via the TRAVEL EDGE portal and also, crucially, directly on airline and hotel websites.

So you cannot use the ATLAS to make bookings via travel websites like Yatra.com or MakeMyTrip. But you are also not restricted just to the TRAVEL EDGE portal, unlike the Magnus Credit Card.

Table 5: Feature Summary – ATLAS Credit Card

In our research, we occasionally found that TRAVEL EDGE did not offer all the flights that were available on say a Yatra.com or the airline website. Sometimes (though not too often) we also found prices on TRAVEL EDGE to be slightly higher than elsewhere.

So the additional flexibility of being able to book directly with airlines and hotels makes it much more likely that you can get the best travel deal out there while also collecting unlimited rewards.

The ATLAS charges a ₹5,000 non-waivable annual fee but the additional savings from 5% unlimited rewards on big ticket travel can easily recoup all that and more. You also get rewards worth ₹5,000 when you pay the annual fee.

That is not all. The ATLAS offers rewards in form of EDGE Miles (worth ₹1), which can be converted into frequent flyer miles at a number of airlines and hotel loyalty programs.

You get 2 partner miles for every EDGE Mile when you convert this way. Now, we value a Club Vistara point at ₹0.90 and a Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer mile at ₹0.80.

So this conversion increases the value of your rewards by a lot. For example an EDGE Mile worth ₹1 becomes 2 CV Points worth ₹1.80. You effective reward rate goes up from 5% to 9%.

We do not use the higher rate in our base case because Axis is missing a number of key airlines in this program, especially Indigo, which means not everyone may be able to benefit from this conversion.

However if you can, travel on one of the partner airlines, the ATLAS becomes an even better option for you.

You do need to be careful when converting the EDGE Miles into partner miles. If the value of a partner mile is less than ₹0.50, this conversion will not make sense. For e.g. the value of a SpiceClub Mile is exactly ₹0.50, so converting to SpiceClub miles won’t increase the value of your miles.

While the ATLAS is indeed a great card for travel bookings, the Magnus Credit Card, also from Axis Bank, is mind-blowingly awesome.

The Magnus offers 60 EDGE Reward points (different from EDGE Miles you earn with the ATLAS) for every ₹200 spent on travel booking at the TRAVEL EDGE Portal. Since an EDGE Rewards point is worth ₹0.20 on the TRAVEL EDGE portal, that is an effective reward rate of 6%.

Table 6: Feature Summary – Magnus Credit Card

However, Magnus customers get 4 partner miles for every 5 EDGE Rewards points. While this looks like a worse conversion ratio vs. the ATLAS (1:2), in fact its 2x better.

1 EDGE Reward point is only worth ₹0.20, so when you convert 5 EDGE Rewards to, lets say, CV Points, you effective get CV points worth ₹3.60 (4 x ₹0.90) in exchange for EDGE Rewards worth ₹1. Your effective reward rate goes up from 6% to a mind-boggling 21.6%.

We suspect these conversion rates are too good to be true and may not last for long. But while they do, the Magnus is miles ahead of any other card for travel bookings.

The Magnus does have some drawback. It has an annual fee of ₹10,000 (waived on charging ₹15 lacs in a year) and the special rewards for travel bookings are only available if you book via the TRAVEL EDGE portal.

As mentioned above, the TRAVEL EDGE portal sometimes doesn’t have all the flight and hotel option available on other travel websites and can sometimes have higher prices. Unlike the travel websites, however, it does not charge a convenience fee on online payments.

Overall, we found the TRAVEL EDGE portal to be adequate and if using it is the price of getting the phenomenal rewards on Magnus, then we think it’s worth it.

How to choose between CASHBACK, ATLAS and Magnus

The CASHBACK SBI Card, The ATLAS and The Magnus are all excellent cards for travel bookings. But how do you choose which one is right for you.

We discussed one criteria above – if your travel bookings expenses do not exceed ₹1-2 lacs per trip, the CASHBACK SBI Card is a great choice for you. You can earn 5% rewards without hitting the monthly cashback cap of ₹10,000.

It has a low and easily waivable annual fee and no income cut-off for being eligible to get the card.

However, could you do better with the ATLAS or Magnus even if you are not at risk of hitting the ₹10,000 monthly cap on the CASHBACK? After all the reward rates on ATLAS and Magnus go as high as 9-20%+ while the CASHBACK is stuck at 5%?

Keep in mind that those higher reward rates on the ATLAS and Magnus are only available if you can convert your points into miles at partner airlines and hotels. Remember also that major airlines like Indigo, Air India and Emirates are not among the partners Axis Bank has.

Table 8: Axis Bank Domestic & International Partners

If you think you can easily spend all your miles with the Axis Bank partners and increase you effective reward rate, you should go for either the ATLAS or the Magnus, instead of the CASHBACK, even if you only fly domestically.

How to choose between the ATLAS and the Magnus? The table below lists the key differences between the two to help you choose.

The bottom line is that to get the Magnus, your annual income needs to exceed ₹18 lacs, and you should be comfortable paying a ₹10,000 annual fee (you do get offsetting rewards, possibly worth a bit less) and you should also be comfortable making all your travel bookings via the TRAVEL EDGE Portal.

Otherwise the ATLAS has an income cut-off of ₹9 lacs, an annual fee of ₹5,000 (offsetting reward available) and allows you to book on the TRAVEL EDGE portal but also directly on airline & hotel websites.

Neither card allows you to earn high rewards when booking on travel websites like Yatra.com or MakeMyTrip – the CASHBACK SBI Card lets you do that.

Table 9: Comparing CASHBACK, Magnus & ATLAS

The Competition

Here we discuss a few other credit cards that offer at least a 5% reward rate on travel bookings and why they were not our picks.

Standard Chartered DigiSmart Credit Card offers a Yatra.com coupon code that gets you

• a 25% discount on hotel bookings, capped at ₹4,000,
• a 20% discount on domestic flights, capped at ₹750 and
• a 10% discount on international flights, capped at ₹10,000

While the headline discounts are high, they have a number of restrictions. First, the coupon can only be used for 1 transaction per category in a quarter and second the caps are quite low, especially for domestic flights.

In our testing, we also found that Yatra.com typically offers a discount code to all customers and while they are not as generous as the ones with DigiSmart, your true savings with the DigiSmart are much lower than what the terms indicate.

In many cases, combining the free-for-all coupon code from Yatra.com with the 5% cashback using the CASHBACK SBI Card will get you a better fare (net of cashback).

The one exception here is that 10% discount with a ₹10,000 cap for international flight. We found that the DigiSmart does achieve the best fare (net of rewards) on international flights as long as the total fare is below ₹1 lacs.

Once that cap is hit, which is likely to happen if you’re booking a long-distance flight with your family, the advantage of the DigiSmart is rapidly diluted.

Paytm SBI Card SELECT offers 5% unlimited cashback for travel bookings made via the Paytm Travel app. Arguably this is a better choice than the CASHBACK SBI Card since there is no cap on the cashback.

However, the Paytm SELECT has a higher & non-waivable annual fee of ₹1,499 and restricts you to the Paytm apps, while the CASHBACK SBI Card has a lower & easily waivable annual fee and no restriction on usage.

The CASHBACK is also a better card overall based on our net reward yield calculation (avg. net reward yield of 2.2% vs. 1.3% for the Paytm SELECT).

6E Rewards XL Credit Cards by Kotak Mahindra & HDFC Bank offer 5% unlimited rewards on flight bookings but not special rewards for hotel bookings. As a result they did not screen well in our simulations.