ICICI Bank Indiatimes
CancelIndia's dot-com boom, laminated: cashback on plane tickets bought from a newspaper's website, and a bank guarantee on the checkout.
no published fee to price it against
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 — every net-value number here would be wrong by exactly the fee we can't find. Everything we can source — the earn rate, the transfer routes, the lounge doors — 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 a fee schedule 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 #1013
Why #1013 The Times Group's first credit card, and an artefact of the dot-com era in India: cashback on airline tickets bought on a portal, cashback in a "special shopping zone", and a bank-funded fraud guarantee on transactions made on one specific website. Carried, not ranked — every dated offer on it expired in 2007 and 2008, and ICICI's current MITC has no Indiatimes row.
i-mint points at the house ₹0.25 — one unit under three names, i-mint to PAYBACK on 1 July 2011 to Zillion in May 2023, all three run by Loyalty Solutions & Research, which renamed the balance rather than converting it. One i-mint point per ₹100 is 0.25%. The indiatimes.com accelerator is NOT in that figure — see the earn comment.
The take
Before the Times Group put its name on Barclays' Times Card, on HDFC's Times Platinum and Titanium, or on ICICI's Times Black, it put it on this — a co-brand built around indiatimes.com, back when a newspaper's portal was also a shopping mall, a travel agent and a ringtone store. The card is a period piece and a useful one, because it shows what an Indian issuer thought online spending needed in 2007. It paid cashback in a "special shopping zone" on the portal and cashback on airline tickets bought there, which makes it one of the earliest travel accelerators on any Indian card; it paid an accelerated points rate on portal spend generally; and — the detail worth keeping — ICICI underwrote the checkout itself, giving the cardholder "special net security" on transactions up to ₹20,000 at indiatimes.com, free of charge, at a moment when Indians were being asked to type a card number into a website for the first time. Both cashback offers carried hard expiry dates printed on the page, in September 2007 and March 2008, and neither was ever renewed in public. ICICI never published a fee for the card, and its current MITC — which still prices HPCL tiers withdrawn a decade ago — has no Indiatimes row at all.
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 — every net-value number here would be wrong by exactly the fee we can't find. 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
- Cashback on airline tickets bought at indiatimes.com — one of the earliest travel accelerators on any Indian credit card
- Cashback in the portal's "special shopping zone", and an accelerated points rate on portal spend generally
- ICICI-funded "special net security" on transactions up to ₹20,000 at indiatimes.com, free to the cardholder
- The Times Group's first co-branded credit card, years before the Barclays, HDFC and ICICI Times cards
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — ICICI publishes no product page for this card, none of the forty-three destinations on its live credit-card listing is an Indiatimes card, and its current MITC has no Indiatimes row
- Both cashback offers were dated on ICICI's own page and expired in September 2007 and March 2008; nothing published replaced them
- The airline-ticket cashback explicitly excluded Air Deccan and SpiceJet tickets — the two carriers an Indian buying a cheap seat online in 2007 was most likely to book
- No fee is claimed here: ICICI's index routes every co-brand to a generic fees page that prices two unrelated cards, and nothing else has ever priced this one
- The points went into i-mint, which is Zillion today — a coalition programme, not an ICICI currency, and a balance from this card lives at zillionrewards.in or nowhere
- 0.25% is the BASE only. The co-brand accelerator ICICI published is quoted in the bank's own pre-2010 reward points, whose conversion into i-mint was never printed, so no percentage is claimed for it
- Every benefit was tied to one website; indiatimes.com no longer sells airline tickets or runs a shopping zone
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes PAYBACK Points (now Zillion Coins) into a programme that publishes an award chart. These points buy catalogue and portal redemptions, not award seats — so this page has no flight to show you, and will not invent one.
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. ICICI has no product page for the Indiatimes card, it appears nowhere on the bank's live credit-card listing, and its current MITC has no row for it. The Times Group's live co-brands are Barclays', HDFC's and ICICI's Times Black — all different products.
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.
Every document behind this page — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official ICICI Bank's own co-branded credit-card index (archived 03-Jan-2012) — the page that lists "ICICI Bank Indiatimes" as a card in its own right, with its exclusive features and their expiry dates
- official ICICI's current credit-card MITC — the document that prices every variant the bank still services, and has no Indiatimes row in it
- official The loyalty programme's own FAQ, published on payback.in during the changeover (archived 01-Jul-2011) — it names i-mint and PAYBACK in one document and says the points were renamed, not converted
- official ICICI's live credit-card listing — the only Times-branded destination on it is Times Black, a different card