HDFC Bank Central Travel Account Card
KeepYour company's airfares, lodged with the travel agent — fifty days to pay and nothing to join.
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 HDFC Bank 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 #550
Why #550 Carried, not ranked. A lodged corporate travel account rather than a wallet card — but a free one with the longest credit period and the lowest non-payment rate on HDFC's commercial schedule, and an air-accident cover no personal HDFC card matches.
The take
The Central Travel Account is the account an employer lodges with its travel agency so that nobody has to carry the airfare. Staff raise a travel requisition, the agency charges the account, and every ticket, cancellation and refund lands in one place: "All refunds for the cancelled bookings credited back to same CTA card." HDFC asks for ten crore of annual turnover, and takes a fixed deposit as collateral from companies below it. The terms are the surprise. Joining and renewal are Nil. The credit period runs "Upto 50 days for CTA" — the longest on HDFC's commercial schedule, where the Dealer card gets twenty-two and Utility forty. And if the bill is late, CTA is charged 1.50% per month, 18% annually — against 2.95% a month and 35.4% a year for the Purchase and Utility cards sitting in the same table. There is no revolving to speak of: minimum repayment for other commercial cards is "100% of total amount due", and cash advance is "Not applicable". The travel benefits are real rather than decorative. MakeMyTrip MyBiz gives 4% off flights and hotels with free meal and seat selection and low cancellation fees; SmartBuy BizDeals claims up to 40% off business travel and software. The insurance block is better than most personal travel cards manage: air accident cover to ₹30 lakh, ₹25,000 for lost baggage, ₹15,000 for a flight delay past twelve hours and ₹10,000 each for delayed baggage and lost documents — all four of those international travel only. What it does not do is pay. HDFC publishes no accrual for this account in any document, and the whole apparatus — MIS reports by airline, hotel and merchant, three levels of captured data down to cost centre and project code, free ERP push into Concur, Oracle, Happay or Zoho — exists to reconcile spend, not to reward it. That is the trade a finance team is making, and it is a defensible one.
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
HDFC Bank 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.
What has changed under this card
- 1 Sep 2026 SmartBuy moves Amazon Pay gift cards to 1X under Insta Deals issuer-wide
- 1 Jul 2026 HDFC caps SmartBuy brand-voucher rewards issuer-wide
- 15 May 2026 HDFC lifts its DCC markup to 1.75% across the card range issuer-wide
We price what is in force today — a change that has not happened yet is not in these numbers. the full archive for this card →
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
- Nil to open and nil a year — the schedule of charges prints one combined line reading Nil
- Up to fifty days of credit, the longest period on HDFC's commercial schedule
- Non-payment costs 1.50% a month, 18% annually — the lowest rate in that table by a wide margin
- Air accident cover up to ₹30 lakh; ₹25,000 lost baggage, ₹15,000 flight delay past 12 hours, ₹10,000 each for delayed baggage and lost passport or documents (international travel only)
- MakeMyTrip MyBiz: 4% off flights and hotels, free meal and seat selection, low cancellation fees
- SmartBuy BizDeals claims up to 40% off business travel and software purchases
- Refunds for cancelled bookings come back to the same account, and net fare is what gets debited
- Data capture down to ticket number, routing, employee ID, cost centre and project code, pushed into the company ERP at no charge
Watch out
- HDFC publishes no reward rate for it anywhere — the account is sold on reporting and credit terms, not on accrual
- Nobody holds it: the account is lodged with the corporate's travel agency, which charges it against each authorised travel requisition
- No lounge access is published for it, and it opens no door on our map
- Forex runs at the commercial band of 3.5%, plus 1% dynamic-conversion markup since January 2023
- It cannot revolve — minimum repayment for other commercial cards is 100% of the total amount due, and cash advance is "Not applicable"
- Spend is capped to travel: air, hotel and visa bookings, the last two "to be discussed in detail along with Travel agency"
- Ten crore of annual turnover is the stated bar; below it HDFC wants a fixed deposit as collateral
- Disputes must be raised within 60 days of the statement, and a late dispute still attracts finance and late fees
What these points actually fly
HDFC Bank 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.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
No consumer application exists. A company enquires through HDFC's commercial cards desk; HDFC's stated bar is "10 Crores is the required Minimum annual turnover", and a company below it "can still apply for CTA basis secured collaterals like Fixed deposit". The account is then lodged with the corporate's travel management company, and a dedicated CTA support desk runs servicing alongside Corporate Assist.
HDFC Bank 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
8 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.
- 1 Sept 2026SmartBuy moves Amazon Pay gift cards to 1X under Insta DealsAmazon Pay Gift Voucher sat in SmartBuy's accelerated tier — 'up to 5X Reward Points or 5% cashback' → 'Insta Deals: 1 % Instant Discount + 1X Reward Points' — this brand is out of the accelerated tier
The most-farmed HDFC voucher route stopped being a points play. SmartBuy's own voucher storefront now shows the Amazon Pay Gift Voucher under a new "Insta Deals" tile reading "1 % Instant Discount + 1X Reward Points", and the page's own description flipped from "up to 5X Reward Points or 5% cashback" to "up to 1X". The comparison that settles it sits on the same storefront: the Amazon Fresh voucher still carries an "Accelerated Rewards — Upto 5X Reward Points RPs / 5% Cashback" block that the Amazon Pay page no longer has, so this is one brand leaving the accelerated tier, not the tier closing. The date, honestly: the Insta Deals offer ("Flat 1% OFF", ₹10,000 monthly limit) was already live in the page's own data on 31 August 2026, the reward line still read 5X in the 1 September 16:26 UTC archive capture, and read 1X when this desk fetched the page on 2 September — so 1 September is the community's effective date sitting inside a window we can bracket from primary captures, not a figure HDFC published. The bank has announced nothing and no SmartBuy page carries a notice. Two pieces of context for the size of it: brand vouchers were already sub-capped at 3,000 accelerated points a month from 1 July 2026, and Amazon Pay vouchers disappeared from the portal entirely for stretches of July and August before returning in this shape. Flipkart and Amazon Fresh vouchers still pay the accelerated rate; the ₹10,000-a-month Amazon Pay lane now pays base earn plus the 1% instant discount.
- 18 Aug 2026The Harley-Davidson Diners Club drops out of HDFC's bank-wide MITC
- 6 Aug 2026HDFC caps Regalia Gold miles transfers at 50,000 points a month
- 25 Jul 2026HDFC switches on 22 transfer partners for BizPower
- 16 Jul 2026Regalia Gold's cash-out rate quietly drops to ₹0.15
- 1 Jul 2026HDFC caps SmartBuy brand-voucher rewards
- 1 Jul 2026Regalia Gold's domestic lounge access goes spend-gated
- 1 Jul 2026Diners Club Privilege ties its lounge vouchers to prior-quarter spend
Every HDFC Bank change we've dated → 37 events since 2001, 23 of them nerfs — worst year 2026.
Verified against HDFC Bank'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 Central Travel Account Credit Card product page — the turnover bar, the lodged-account mechanics, the MyBiz and BizDeals travel discounts and the published insurance limits
- official HDFC's Schedule of Charges and MITC for this account, Version 2.5 dated 12 August 2024 — the nil fee, the fifty-day credit period and the non-payment rate