ICICI Bank Air Deccan Gold
CancelIndia's first LCC bought loyalty with a credit card. Twenty-one years later, this is all that is left of it.
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 a fee schedule AND an earn table — we have neither number, so there is nothing to net off against nothing. 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 ICICI 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 #863
Why #863 Carried, not ranked, and the oldest airline co-brand on this board. India's first low-cost carrier put its loyalty programme on an ICICI Gold card in March 2005; the airline was sold to Kingfisher in 2007 and the brand was retired in 2011. It is here because the co-brand is genuinely part of the record — the first time an Indian LCC tried to buy loyalty with a credit card — and because nothing else on the internet says what it actually was.
The take
Air Deccan invented the Indian low-cost carrier, and in March 2005 it did something no LCC had done here before: it launched a co-branded credit card, built on ICICI's Gold platform, in a market where frequent-flyer cards belonged to full-service airlines. The proposition was aimed squarely at what an LCC passenger actually cares about — the fare. Buy Air Deccan tickets and the card handed back free ticket vouchers against the spend; book through the airline's website and the card carried EMI schemes for tickets and packages plus fraud cover on the site itself; every month a lucky draw gave away five free return tickets. Points earned on Air Deccan purchases were redeemable against Air Deccan vouchers, which is the giveaway that this was never a transferable-currency card: the loyalty loop began and ended with the airline. That is also why it cannot be priced here. The launch release states no fee and no base earn rate, ICICI has never published a product page or an MITC row for it, and the two numbers the release does give are the voucher milestone, not an accrual. Air Deccan was sold to Kingfisher in 2007, flew on as Simplifly Deccan, and the brand was gone by 2011 — taking the card, the vouchers and the redemption catalogue with it. It is carried for the record, and because a reader searching for it deserves the facts rather than a rebuilt guess.
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 a fee schedule AND an earn table — we have neither number, so there is nothing to net off against nothing. 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
ICICI 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
- 10 Sep 2026 ICICI's September lounge list drops four doors and adds Bhogapuram issuer-wide
- 29 Aug 2026 ICICI un-reserves Mumbai's Adani Silver lounge — the whole Annexure-1 board gets in issuer-wide
- 1 Jul 2026 ICICI's lounge-gate exemption expires for Adani One and MakeMyTrip 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
- The first co-branded credit card from an Indian low-cost carrier, launched March 2005
- Free Air Deccan ticket vouchers worth Rs. 3,000 for every Rs. 30,000 of Air Deccan tickets bought on the card
- EMI schemes for air tickets and travel packages, and fraud cover on transactions made on the Air Deccan website
- A monthly lucky draw for five free return tickets
Watch out
- RETIRED — Air Deccan was sold to Kingfisher in 2007 and the brand was withdrawn in 2011
- Absent from ICICI's August 2026 MITC entirely, so no fee, rate or benefit is published anywhere today
- No base earn rate is claimed here: the launch release gave only the airline-spend accelerator, never the rate on everything else
- The points redeemed against Air Deccan vouchers — an airline that no longer exists, and a catalogue that went with it
What these points actually fly
ICICI 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.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
You cannot, and have not been able to for the better part of two decades. The airline was absorbed into Kingfisher in 2007 and the brand retired in 2011; ICICI has no product page for the card and no row for it in the MITC that prices its current book.
ICICI 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.
- 10 Sept 2026ICICI's September lounge list drops four doors and adds BhogapuramThe prior edition opened Bhubaneswar's landside Bird Lounge, Vadodara's Premium Lounge, Visakhapatnam's Airr Lounge and Bar, and Dehradun's landside Bird Lounge, and filed Ahmedabad T2 international as The Lounge opposite Gate 3 → Those four rooms are gone. Bhubaneswar keeps O'Vetra near Gate 8, Dehradun keeps Carnations in the security hold, Vadodara is off the list, and Visakhapatnam's rows are Encalm domestic and international at Bhogapuram. Ahmedabad T2 international is Adani Silver Lounge - International, Gate 08, and it is not asterisked
ICICI re-saved its consolidated domestic lounge list on 10 September 2026 and moved rooms, not quotas. Four doors an Annexure-1 card used to open are off the list: Bhubaneswar's landside Bird Lounge (O'Vetra, airside near Gate 8, stays), Vadodara entirely, Visakhapatnam's Airr Lounge and Bar, and Dehradun's landside Bird Lounge (Carnations, in the security hold, stays). Visakhapatnam's replacement is two Encalm rooms at Bhogapuram, which this map does not carry yet — the airport is not in our coordinate file, so those doors are recorded here and not drawn. Ahmedabad's T2 international row is no longer The Lounge opposite Gate 3. It is Adani Silver Lounge - International, first floor, Gate 08, and the row has no asterisk, so the whole Annexure-1 board gets it at each card's own quarterly quota rather than the three unlimited cards alone. Noida's three Jewar rows are still on the PDF and still unmapped.
- 29 Aug 2026ICICI un-reserves Mumbai's Adani Silver lounge — the whole Annexure-1 board gets in
- 29 Jul 2026Times Black publishes its eligibility bar and swaps BLADE for Thumby Aviation
- 1 Jul 2026ICICI's lounge-gate exemption expires for Adani One and MakeMyTripAdani One ICICI Signature, Adani One ICICI Platinum and the MakeMyTrip ICICI Bank Credit Card were exempt from the ₹75,000-per-quarter spend gate on complimentary domestic lounge access — "valid till Jun 30, 2026" → All three now "require spends of ₹ 75,000 to be made in a calendar quarter to unlock airport lounge access in the next calendar quarter, with effect from Jul 01, 2026"
ICICI's MITC, headed "Last updated on Aug 2nd, 2026", carries the expiry date inside the exemption list itself and then restates it as a dated instruction below. No lounge visit is removed — MakeMyTrip keeps 2 domestic a quarter plus 1 international, Adani One Signature 4 a quarter plus 2 Priority Pass, Adani One Platinum 2 a quarter — but all of them now cost ₹3 lakh of routed annual spend on top of the fee, which reprices the ₹750 Adani One Platinum hardest. The ₹75,000 excludes rent, government, education, EMI, fees, interest, DCC and reversals, and the qualifying quarter is offset (26th to 25th), so the spend that unlocks Oct-Dec was made between 26 June and 25 September. Worth flagging for the desk: ICICI's own "Upcoming changes to Credit Card features and charges" page, re-read 28 August 2026, still lists MakeMyTrip among the exempt cards with no expiry, and never names the Adani One pair at all. Two live ICICI documents, two different answers; the MITC is the regulated one and the more recently dated, so it is the one we follow.
- 1 Feb 2026ICICI gates its BookMyShow movie perk behind quarterly spend
- 15 Jan 2026ICICI caps transport rewards and excludes rent, tax, fuel spends
- 15 Nov 2024ICICI's November purge: rewards, lounges and 1% fees
- 5 Feb 2024ICICI stops rewards on rent and wallet loads
Every ICICI Bank change we've dated → 10 events since 2019, 7 of them nerfs — worst year 2026.
Verified against ICICI Bank's own documents on
Not published , and we will not invent it: the annual fee · the earn rate and the currency it earns.
Every document behind this page — 2 of them, each with the day we read it
- official ICICI Bank and Air Deccan's joint launch release, 30 March 2005 — the only document that names the card, its voucher benefit and its Air Deccan accelerator
- official ICICI Bank's MITC, last updated 2 August 2026 — it prices thirty variants and has no Air Deccan row, which is why this card carries no fee and no rate