SBI Central Travel Account Card
KeepFor the people your company flies who do not work there — consultants, candidates and whole groups.
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 SBI Card 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 #560
Why #560 Carried, not ranked. SBI's lodged air-travel account, and the one on this shelf aimed squarely at people who are not employees — consultants, job candidates and groups. Free, fenced by merchant category, and a charge card: pay it in full or pay 40.2% a year.
The take
Most central travel accounts are sold as a way to stop employees fronting airfares. SBI's is pitched at the harder case, and its own words are the reason to carry it: consolidate air travel "for infrequent travelers, consultants, job candidates, and even large groups traveling — charged by your company or designated travel agency — into a single, centrally billed account". A job candidate has no corporate card and no expense account, and this is the instrument that flies them. The controls are the ordinary corporate kit, done properly. Spend can be restricted at "merchant categories not related to travel or travel related categories", with daily, weekly or monthly limits per category, and eight user-defined fields can be added to the data file so the spend arrives tagged the way the company's systems want it. The money terms are where a finance team should look twice. It is free — Nil joining, Nil annual — and interest-free credit runs 20 to 50 days. But SBI is explicit that this is "a charge card and does not offer revolving facility": the total amount payable is the total outstanding due, and carrying anything costs up to 3.35% a month, 40.2% a year, from the transaction date rather than from the statement. Late payment tops out at ₹750, payment dishonour costs 2% with a ₹350 floor, and — unusually for this shelf — cash advance exists at a variable limit, priced up to 2.5% domestically and 3% abroad with no free credit period at all. It pays nothing. The only reward lines SBI prints against this account are a ₹99 redemption fee and an annual reward fee of up to ₹300, which are charges rather than an earn, and no rate appears anywhere. Foreign spend is up to 3.5%, the Indian norm.
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
SBI Card 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
- 3 Aug 2026 SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programme issuer-wide
- 31 Mar 2026 SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES issuer-wide
- 10 Jan 2026 SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees 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, printed as two separate lines on SBI's own fees block
- Built for non-employees: consultants, job candidates, infrequent travellers and large groups
- Interest-free credit of 20 to 50 days on retail purchases, if the previous month cleared in full
- Merchant-category control, with daily, weekly or monthly spending limits on selected categories
- Eight user-defined fields can be added to the data file for the company's own reconciliation
- Emergency card replacement is complimentary
- One bill, one payment, with spend data SBI pitches as leverage in supplier negotiations
Watch out
- A charge card: SBI says outright it "does not offer revolving facility", and the total amount payable is the total outstanding due
- Carrying a balance costs up to 3.35% a month, 40.2% a year, charged from the transaction date — not from the statement date
- SBI publishes no reward rate for it; the ₹99 redemption fee and the annual reward fee of up to ₹300 are charges, not an earn
- No lounge access is published for it, and it opens no door on our map
- Forex is up to 3.5%, India's norm
- Cash advance carries no free credit period and costs up to 2.5% domestically, 3% internationally, with a ₹450 cap in each case
- Payment dishonour costs 2% of the payment, minimum ₹350, and a minimum finance charge of ₹25 applies to each retail and cash transaction
What these points actually fly
SBI Card 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.
Corporate only, through SBI Card's commercial desk — the corporate section carries an "Apply Now" and an enquiry form, plus a digital onboarding route and a Program Manager login for running the account afterwards. SBI publishes no turnover, headcount or spend bar for it.
SBI Card 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.
- 3 Aug 2026SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programmeSBI Card Travel Credits transferred 1:1 into Etihad Guest, one of eighteen airline partners in §3 of the MILES rewards T&C. At the ₹1/partner-mile anchor that was a full-value exit, and it was the only route left after the two Etihad Guest SBI co-brands were retired. → No Etihad route at all. The MILES rewards T&C now lists seventeen airline partners and Etihad is not one of them — the word does not appear anywhere in the seven-page document. Every other SBI partner survives at the same ratio.
SBI Card's own MILES rewards T&C, re-fetched on 22 August 2026 and carrying a 3 August 2026 ModDate inside the PDF, has one fewer airline in it than the edition this desk read on 2 August. The deletion is provable from the numbering rather than from absence alone: the table's first seven rows are unchanged (Air Canada 3, Air France-KLM 4, Air India 5, British Airways 6, Cathay 7), and every row from position eight onward has moved up exactly one — Thai from 14 to 13, Qantas from 17 to 16. Position eight was Etihad Airways / Etihad Guest / 1:1. All twenty-four other partners we carry, airline and hotel, are still there at the same ratios, so this is Etihad being dropped and not SBI narrowing transfers. The timing matters more than the ratio. SBI phased out the Etihad Guest SBI and Etihad Guest SBI Premier cards from December 2025 and reissued holders onto MILES products, and the transfer route was what made that migration survivable — a Premier holder who had spent six years earning Etihad miles could keep feeding the same account through Travel Credits. That is now closed, and India's remaining pipes into Etihad Guest run through BOBCARD's Etihad co-brands, not through SBI. If you hold SBI Travel Credits earmarked for an Abu Dhabi business seat, they are Aeroplan, Flying Blue, Avios or Maharaja points now. ON THE DATE: SBI publishes no notice and no cut-off. The date here is the day the desk read the change out of SBI's own document; the PDF's internal ModDate puts the edition at 3 August 2026, which is the earliest day we can prove, not an announcement.
- 1 Jul 2026PhonePe SBI SELECT BLACK stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
- 1 Jul 2026PhonePe SBI PURPLE stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
- 31 Mar 2026SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES
- 9 Mar 2026Paytm SBI Card stops earning on school and education spends
- 9 Mar 2026Paytm SBI Card SELECT stops earning on school and education spends
- 10 Jan 2026SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees
- 1 Dec 2025SBI discontinues the OLA Money card and moves holders onto a house card
Every SBI Card change we've dated → 19 events since 1998, 13 of them nerfs — worst year 2025.
Verified against SBI Card'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 SBI Central Travel Account Card page — the nil joining and annual fee, the charge-card structure, the finance and cash-advance charges and the merchant-category controls
- official SBI Card's Most Important Terms and Conditions for corporate-liability cards — the governing document for the corporate shelf this account sits on