HSBC Corporate Travel and Entertainment
KeepEight lounge visits, 52 days of float, and not one reward point.
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 HSBC publishes terms we can cite.
Why we decline to value some cards, and what it takes to change that →
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #543
Why #543 A business card carried, not ranked. The only commercial card on this board that pairs a named-employee T&E programme with eight domestic lounge visits a year and zero corporate liability for a cardholder's deliberate misuse — and it earns nothing at all.
The take
HSBC's Corporate T&E card is the plainest kind of commercial card and it is unusually honest about it. There is no rewards programme — not a slow one, none — and in exchange the bank spends the budget on the two things a travelling employee actually notices: two complimentary domestic lounge visits every quarter through the Mastercard India lounge programme, and travel insurance that covers accidents, delays, lost luggage, lost travel documents and emergency medical assistance. ₹2,000 to take, ₹2,000 a year, per card, from HSBC's own tariff sheet — with the caveat that the same document says the fee "may vary depending on the offer" a company negotiated, so treat it as the published standard rather than the price you will pay. The float is genuinely long: up to 52 interest-free days, which on a T&E programme settled monthly by the company is most of a working cycle. Beyond the due date it costs 3.3% a month, 39.6% a year, and a foreign transaction costs 3.5% — no concession, which for a card sold on international travel is the number to argue about. The clause worth reading twice is the liability one: "Zero corporate liability against deliberate misuse by cardholders". HSBC is insuring the company against its own employee, which tells you what this product is for. So does clause 8 of the MITC — when a cardholder leaves, the company must stop the card and destroy it. Reporting runs through MiVision and Mastercard Smart Data, and Smart Data is separately priced at ₹10,000 a year plus ₹7,000 to implement, per company, which nobody puts on the brochure.
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
HSBC 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
- 15 Aug 2026 HSBC zeroes the forex mark-up on every card it sells — for 32 days 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
- 2 complimentary domestic lounge visits every quarter — 8 a year, on the Mastercard India lounge programme
- Up to 52 interest-free days
- Zero corporate liability against deliberate misuse by a cardholder
- Travel insurance covering accidents, delays, lost luggage, lost travel documents and emergency medical assistance
- Individually held: the employee's name is embossed and signed for, against the company's account
Watch out
- No rewards programme at all — HSBC's page and its MITC name no points, no catalogue and no accrual, and the "Mastercard Rewards" line is scheme offers, not earn
- 3.5% on foreign currency, with no concession — on a card sold for international travel
- The ₹2,000 fees are the tariff sheet's STANDARD; the same clause says they "may vary depending on the offer" the company negotiated
- Smart Data reporting is priced separately at ₹10,000 a year plus a ₹7,000 implementation fee, per company
- 3.3% a month (39.6% a year) past the due date, a ₹500 late fee, and 2.5% (minimum ₹350) on cash
- Not valid for foreign-currency transactions in Nepal and Bhutan
What these points actually fly
HSBC 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
43 of 793 tracked doors
Opens 43 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 24 airports , via Mastercard India — see the full map →
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.
HSBC 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 2026HSBC Live+ switches on its international lounge visit, and adds a 1GB global eSIM2 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year (one every 6 calendar months) and nothing international — HSBC's own footnote read "1 international visit per year will be available from 1 September 2026" → The same 2 domestic visits plus 1 international visit per CALENDAR year, claimed through a separate HSBC platform powered by Thriwe, and 1 complimentary 1GB global eSIM a calendar year (7 days, 98 countries) with 20% off every top-up
A dated benefit arriving on time is not news; what HSBC did around it is. The w.e.f. date was published in advance in the Live+ Service Guide — this desk read it there on 16 August — and as it landed HSBC rewrote the product page's own footnote, the `airport-lounge-live-plus` anchor in its dpws-footnotes.json, to drop the future tense and, for the first time, say HOW you get the visit: "To access your benefits, visit the dedicated platform powered by Thriwe." That matters more than the wording suggests. This is not a lounge network and not a card tap; it is a claim you make on hsbcliveplus.thriwe.com, and a benefit you have to go and fetch is a benefit a fair share of cardholders will never fetch. HSBC still names no network for either quota, domestic or international, which is why our lounge map carries the counts and no scheme. Riding in on the same rewrite, undated by HSBC and therefore logged here rather than on a date of its own: "1 Complimentary 1GB valid Global eSIM per calendar year, plus a 20% discount on every top-up. The 1GB pack will be valid for 7 days across 98 countries." Read the numbers before you rate it — one gigabyte, seven days, once a year. That is a long-weekend's maps and messages, not a roaming plan, and the honest framing is a taster that sells top-ups at a discount. On a ₹999 card HSBC reverses at ₹2,00,000 of spend it is still free money; it is just much less money than "complimentary global eSIM" sounds. Nothing in this changes what the card earns: the 10% capped at ₹1,200 a month, the 1.5% uncapped, the zero on international spend since 26 July 2026 and the 1.99% markup are all untouched.
- 1 Sept 2026HSBC's RuPay Platinum welcome suite lapses — ₹500 cashback, EazyDiner and the UPI ₹250 all end together
- 1 Sept 2026HSBC's RuPay Cashback welcome suite lapses — ₹500 cashback, EazyDiner and the UPI ₹250 all end together
- 31 Aug 2026HSBC's 0% forex window on the RuPay Cashback card closes
- 15 Aug 2026HSBC zeroes the forex mark-up on every card it sells — for 32 days
- 1 Jul 2026HSBC TravelOne guts its welcome offer for new applicants
- 1 Dec 2024HSBC TravelOne arrives — a 20-partner airmiles card
- 28 Nov 2023HSBC Premier Credit Card returns as a metal card
Every HSBC change we've dated → 9 events since 1987, 6 of them nerfs — worst year 2026.
Verified against HSBC'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 HSBC India's Corporate Travel and Entertainment Card page — the individually-held framing, the quarterly lounge quota, the 52-day float and the zero-corporate-liability clause
- official HSBC India's Most Important Terms and Conditions for Corporate Cards — the ₹2,000 tariff row, the 3.5% foreign-currency charge and the clause that returns the card when the employee leaves