BOBCARD Etihad Guest Premium
KeepThe last clean pipe into Etihad Guest — 2 miles/₹100, 0% forex, milestone confetti.
Fee, justified: before you earn a single point, this card bundles ~₹2,500/yr of memberships + elite status you'd actually use — weigh that against the ₹5,000 annual fee. Rewards and milestones stack on top (run your spend → · every card's perks, ranked →).
What it's worth to you — net annual value
Welcome: 15,000 Guest miles — 10,000 on ₹25k in 60 days + fee payment, 5,000 more at ₹50k (doubled window till 31 Aug 2026; standard offer is 7,500)
Active offers: BOBCARD Etihad Guest Premium — welcome miles doubled to 15,000 (ends in 44 days)
How these numbers are computed →
Spend tiers, milestones and fee waivers included, at our house ₹/point. Portal and category multipliers can push higher — run your exact number →
The take
With Axis dropping Etihad on 30 June 2026 and Amex long gone, this Mastercard is the only way left to earn Guest miles from Indian card spend — and it earns hard: 2 miles per ₹100 everywhere, 6 on etihad.com, plus 500 miles a month at ₹50k, 4,000 a quarter at ₹3L and 24,000 a year at ₹12L. Run ₹1L a month through it and the stack pays 70,000 miles — 5.8% at the ₹1/mile anchor — with the ₹5,000 fee waived at ₹5L and 0% forex on top. The catch is concentration: every mile auto-sweeps into one drifting-dynamic airline program, and the exclusion list (telecom, education, insurance, government — even train, bus and toll payments) guts the "2% on everything" pitch for household spend. Fly Etihad to AUH or Europe even twice a year and nothing at this fee comes close; never fly them and the miles are wallpaper.
What's good
- 2 Guest miles/₹100 base, 6/₹100 on Etihad — before milestones
- 70,000 miles/yr at ₹1L/month once the monthly, quarterly and annual bonuses stack
- 0% forex markup and 12 domestic + 8 international lounge visits, no spend gate
- Etihad Guest Gold in year 1 on your first etihad.com purchase (Silver on first swipe)
Watch out
- Single-program currency: miles auto-transfer to Etihad Guest and redeem nowhere else
- Long exclusion list: telecom, education, hospitals, government, rent, wallets, insurance — and all rail/bus/toll transport — earn zero
- 1% processing fee on rent and wallet loads; utility fee ≥₹50k; fuel fee ≥₹10k (MITC)
- Etihad keeps drifting dynamic — the ₹1/mile anchor is the middle, not the floor
What earns, what doesn't
The official MITC-cum-KFS (22-06-2026) publishes the exclusion table (Annexure 1): agriculture, contractor, passenger transport/rail/bus/toll, telecom, rent, cleaning & personal services, government, education, hospital, wallet, insurance, charity earn no base miles. Supermarkets and fast food — reported excluded by early community coverage — are NOT on the official list. The MITC adds 1% processing FEES on rent, wallet loads, big utility and big fuel transactions.
- Fuel · excluded Zero miles (official MITC: surcharge-waiver fuel txns earn nothing); 1% waiver on ₹500–₹5,000, cap ₹250/cycle; 1% processing fee on fuel txns ≥₹10k
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero miles (Annexure 1, MCC 6513) + 1% processing fee (official MITC)
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero miles + 1% processing fee on MCCs 6539–6543 (official MITC)
- Insurance · excluded Zero miles — Annexure 1 MCCs 5960/6300 (official MITC)
per BOBCARD (Bank of Baroda) T&C · rank every card by spend category →
Lounge access
Opens 73 of 644 tracked lounge doors across 41 airports — see the full map →
Can you get it?
The cutoffs and the actual route in — not the "apply now" button, the door that opens.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
per the official BOBCARD (Bank of Baroda) MITC — figures marked (community) aren't in the PDF; the issuer won't say · filter the ranking by what you can get →
The fine print
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
Fee ₹5,000, waived at ₹5L anniversary-year spend. Watch the processing fees: 1% on rent (MCC 6513) and wallet loads, 1% on utility txns ≥₹50k (cap ₹3,000/txn), 1% on fuel txns ≥₹10k. Card replacement ₹100. BOBCARD publishes no income cutoff; age 21–60 from the official application guidelines. MITC dated 22-06-2026.
per the official BOBCARD (Bank of Baroda) MITC · reviewed 10 Jul 2026
What's changed for this card
Full tracker →Devaluations and buffs that touch this card directly, its issuer, or the points and programs it earns and transfers to.
- 30 Jun 2026Amex India cuts Etihad Guest as an MR transfer partnerMR points transferable to Etihad Guest Miles → Etihad Guest transfer route closed for good
Membership Rewards points could move to Etihad Guest only until 30 June 2026, 11:59 PM IST — after that the route is dead, part of a global Amex-Etihad wind-down already hitting the UK, US, Canada and Germany. Neither side explained why, but Etihad's generous Etihad Guest sweet spots (especially A380 First redemptions) were a favourite MR outlet for Indian cardholders, and this closes one of the better ones with no replacement announced. Points already transferred are unaffected — only future transfers stop.
- 5 May 2026Eterna's lifetime-free window rolls forward yet again₹2,499 joining + ₹2,499 annual fee (LTF offer due to lapse) → Zero joining and annual fees for new applicants, extended to 30 Jun 2026 — since pushed to 31 Jul
BOBCARD keeps extending the deadline on its best acquisition offer: Eterna — 3.75% statement-credit value on online spends and unlimited domestic lounges — stays lifetime-free for new applicants. The offer opened in early 2026 with a 31-March fuse and has been rolled forward twice; every extension is a louder hint that the ₹2,499 fee isn't coming back soon. Sign before the music stops.
- 1 Apr 2026BOBCARD reprices rail, toll and app-routed educationNo processing fee on railway/toll/bus bookings; telecom (MCC 4814) earned zero points → 1% fee on railway bookings ≥₹30k, all toll & bus ≥₹5k, and education via Cred/Paytm/PhonePe-type apps; telecom now earns core points
BOBCARD's April-2026 notice gives with one hand and clips with the other. Telecom spends finally earn core points (3 RP/₹100 on Eterna), but big-ticket rail bookings, every toll and bus charge over ₹5,000, and tuition routed through third-party apps now carry a 1% fee — and the notice restates the long zero-earn MCC list, from supermarkets to hospitals. One, Uni and the Scapia co-brand are explicitly exempt.
- 5 Jan 2026BOBCARD and Etihad Guest deal two co-brands — the last pipe inEtihad Guest earn from Indian card spend dying with the SBI co-brands (closing 31 Mar 2026) → Guest (₹2,500) and Guest Premium (₹5,000): 2 miles/₹100, 0% forex, double welcome miles for sign-ups till 28 Feb
As SBI walked away from Etihad and Axis prepared to drop the transfer route, BOBCARD picked up the whole franchise: two Mastercard co-brands earning Guest miles directly, with the Premium doing 2 miles/₹100, 6 on etihad.com, 0% forex and a milestone ladder to 40,000 miles a year. Launch-window sign-ups before 28 February got doubled welcome miles. For anyone flying AUH out of India, this is now the only game in town.
- 23 Feb 2024Etihad Guest overhauls pricing, adds cancellation penaltiesShort-haul partner First: 14,000 miles; no hard expiry → Short-haul partner First: 35,000 miles; expires in 18mo
Etihad Guest's February 2024 shake-up landed as a mixed bag but leaned devaluation: short-haul first-class partner awards jumped 150% to 35,000 miles, miles now hard-expire after 18 months regardless of activity, and canceling a redemption within a week of departure now costs a 75% mileage penalty. The one bright spot — GuestSeat cash-and-points fares got up to 30% cheaper — doesn't offset the structural tightening for anyone parking Amex or HDFC Diners points here.
- 19 Sept 2019Etihad Guest kills its Royal Air Maroc mileage sweet spotDistance-based partner pricing let connections ride nearly free → Per-segment pricing effectively doubles the cost of connecting itineraries
Royal Air Maroc redemptions through Etihad Guest were one of the aviation world's better-kept secrets, cheap business class connections routed through Casablanca. Etihad quietly switched to per-segment pricing around September 2019, confirmed publicly around September 19, meaning any itinerary with a connection now cost roughly double in miles. For Indian Etihad Guest holders who'd built their whole redemption strategy around this route, it was gone with barely a warning email.
- 17 Apr 2019Jet Airways grounds its fleet; JPMiles left in limboJPMiles on a flying full-service airline → Airline suspended; InterMiles soldiers on
India's premier full-service airline stopped flying overnight, stranding countless JPMiles balances. The Etihad-backed loyalty arm rebranded to InterMiles and limped on, but the lesson stuck: never hoard miles in a shaky program.
- 30 Jun 2018Etihad Guest moves to demand-based dynamic award pricingFixed award chart on Etihad-operated flights → Peak/off-peak dynamic pricing, scant advance notice
Etihad Guest ditched its fixed award chart for airline-flight redemptions and switched to a peak-versus-off-peak dynamic model, revealing exact pricing only days before it went live. This was the second Etihad hit of 2018 and the template every airline devaluation since has copied: kill the chart, kill the predictability, keep the surcharges.
Go deeper
Sources
Every fact on this page is checked against these documents — the issuer's own paperwork first. Spot something stale? The PDF wins, and we re-verify.
- official Product page (monthly 500/₹50k, quarterly 4,000/₹3,00,000, annual 24,000/₹12L bonuses) checked 12 Jul 2026
- official MITC-cum-KFS PDF checked 13 Jul 2026
- official Welcome-offer T&C PDF checked 12 Jul 2026
- community LiveFromALounge launch coverage checked 12 Jul 2026
- community Mint — cards launched on the Mastercard network checked 11 Jul 2026
- community CardExpert review — Silver on first swipe, Gold (year-1) on first etihad.com purchase; 12 domestic + 8 international lounge visits checked 13 Jul 2026
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