International Times Citibank Card
CancelThe Times Group's card: free for life, event access, and India's first card for a twelve-year-old.
no published earn rate to price
Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for
What it's worth to you, after the fee
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. Everything we can source — the fee, the charges, the migration that put this card in your hand — is above and stands on its own; this card is simply not on the board, not in the calculator, and cannot win a best-of call until Citibank publishes terms we can cite.
Why we decline to value some cards, and what it takes to change that →
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #899
Why #899 A media co-brand sold on access rather than on rate, and the first Indian card to issue a supplementary to a twelve-year-old. Carried because both of those are firsts, and because the teen card is a product idea Indian issuers have circled ever since without landing it.
The take
The Times Group put its name on a Citi card and sold it, sensibly, on the one thing a newspaper house actually owns — access. Holders got seats at Times events, from the Femina Miss India contest to film premieres and concerts, plus discounts on Filmfare and Femina subscriptions and a cut on Times classified advertising across all its publications, which is the most specific benefit anyone has ever attached to an Indian credit card. The rewards programme was called Khulja Sim Sim and it was a closed catalogue of consumer brands, so the points went the way MTV's did: into merchandise, not into money and certainly not into travel. The genuinely notable thing on the page is the Times iCard, an additional card for children between twelve and twenty-one — the first supplementary card for teenagers in India, a product idea issuers have circled ever since without shipping. The card itself cost nothing for life, took one adult add-on also free for life, and waived the IndianOil fuel surcharge like everything else in the range. As a travel card it is a blank. Long withdrawn, along with most of the magazines it discounted.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
There is no renewal arithmetic to run on this card yet — and a break-even we cannot source is not one we will print.
the whole desk — what changed, the downgrade, and what we cannot price →
Keep, downgrade or cancel
what we can and cannot price
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. A break-even is the spend at which value crosses a fee, and we are short one side of that sentence — so this desk prints no ladder, no crossing and no ₹0 standing in for either. What we can source about this card is under Sources.
Your copy of this card
You hold this card.
Kept on this device, in your browser. It is never sent to us, never synced, and nothing else on the site reads it yet.
The downgrade
Citibank publishes no document naming a card you can step down to, so we name none — an invented product change is a phone call you would waste. That leaves keep or cancel, and we cannot price either side of it.
If you call to cancel
What the bank offers to keep you is the one fact this desk cannot compute. We are collecting those reports — dated, and only in aggregate — before publishing any: an offer one reader was made is not one you are owed. Called about this card? Tell us what they offered →
The desk publishes subscribable .ics feeds for the dates it knows — offer deadlines, devaluations, expiry audits. Your renewal date is not one of them: only your statement knows it.
What's good
- Free for life in Citi's own printed words, with one adult additional card also free for life
- The Times iCard: an additional card for children between twelve and twenty-one, the first of its kind in India
- Invitations to Times Group events — the Femina Miss India contest, film premieres, concerts and launches
- 10% off Filmfare and Femina subscriptions, and 15% off Times classified advertising across every Times Group publication
- Fuel-surcharge waiver at IndianOil outlets, taking Citi's stated 2.5% surcharge to zero
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — gone from Citi India's range before the Axis Bank handover, and not one of the nine products on Axis's Forward Together site
- THE POINTS HAD ONE EXIT: the Khulja Sim Sim catalogue of consumer brands. No cash, no statement credit, no airline and no hotel
- No lounge access, no co-brand airline, no travel accelerator, no forex concession and no conversion out
- Nothing here is valued, and it never will be: Citi published the accrual — a point per ₹150 — and never what a Times Rewards Point was worth, in any document
- The event access was invitational rather than guaranteed, and Citi published no allocation of any kind
What these points actually fly
Citibank has not published what this card earns, so there are no points here to fly with — not zero points, and not points that go nowhere: nothing stated either way. The moment a benefit sheet exists we will price whatever it names.
what the cards that DO reach a chart can fly — 2,196 corridors priced →
Lounge access
0 of 793 tracked doors
No lounge access. This card opens exactly 0 of 793 tracked lounge doors — board with the crowd, or find a card that doesn't →
Can you get it?
the route in — no cutoffs published
The cutoffs and the actual route in — not the "apply now" button, the door that opens.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
You cannot. The card was withdrawn from Citi India's range before the bank sold its Indian consumer business to Axis Bank, and citibank.co.in no longer resolves. It has no successor on Axis's Forward Together migration site.
Citibank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
no MITC row researched for this card yet · filter the board by what you can get →
What's changed for this card
7 dated changes
Devaluations and buffs that touch this card directly, its issuer, or the points and programs it earns and transfers to. Every one is dated here; the tracker carries each one's before → after and the write-up.
- 15 Apr 2021Citi announces exit from Indian consumer bankingCiti credit cards, retail and wealth in India → Consumer business up for sale (later to Axis)
Citi called time on its Indian consumer arm — including its cult PremierMiles and Rewards cards — citing a lack of scale. The portfolio would eventually pass to Axis, ending one of India's most-loved rewards ecosystems.
- 12 Oct 2019Citi India guts reward earning on utilities, insurance, and tax
- 1 Dec 2017Citi PremierMiles' 10X 'Extra' partner program dies for good
- 1 Apr 2016Citi Prestige strips Etihad Guest Gold and partner perks
- 1 Feb 2015Citi PremierMiles doubles the cost of transferring to airline partners
- 16 Jul 2012Citibank kills Jet Airways co-brand, pivots to PremierMiles
- 16 Jul 2012Citibank Retires 13-Year Jet Airways Co-Brand, Launches PremierMiles
Every Citibank change we've dated → 7 events since 2012, 4 of them nerfs — worst year 2019.
Verified against Citibank's own documents on
Not published , and we will not invent it: the earn rate and the currency it earns.
Every document behind this page — 2 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Citibank India's own International Times Card product page (archived 31-Aug-2007) — "This Card comes to you Free for Life", the Khulja Sim Sim rate and the Times iCard for teens
- official "Forward Together", Axis Bank's Citi-transition site — the closed nine-product set Citi India still had at the handover, which does not include this card