Etihad Guest SBI Card
CancelThe ₹1,499 door into Etihad Guest — and SBI shut it on 31 March 2026.
a year at ₹40,000 a month, after the fee
Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for
What it's worth to you, after the fee
Welcome: 2,500 Etihad Guest Miles within 30 days of paying the annual fee, plus complimentary Etihad Guest Silver tier after the first transaction — both closed with the card on 31 Mar 2026
Priced on the everyday mix — 30% groceries · 10% utilities · 20% travel · 6% fuel · 34% everything else — with this card's published category rules applied. Plus milestones, minus the fee. No accelerator credit — the ranking model on /compare adds ~20% of spend at the card's best accelerator, so its ₹ for this card reads higher.
How these numbers are computed — and why the rankings show a bigger one →
Spend tiers, milestones and fee waivers included, at our house ₹/point. Portal and category multipliers can push higher — run your exact number →
Pays for itself at ₹13,000 a month
At ₹13,000 a month — ₹1,56,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹1,600 gross (earn ₹1,600) against its ₹1,499 fee = ₹100 net — the first rung at or above ₹0. The ladder runs in ₹1,000 steps to ₹1,00,000 a month and ₹10,000 steps to ₹5,00,000; figures are rounded to the hundred, and the accelerator is never credited.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #700
Why #700 Carried as a record, not a recommendation: SBI deactivated this card on 31 March 2026 and moved every holder to SBI Card MILES, so nothing about it is available to a reader today.
The take
This was the cheap way an Indian card earned Etihad Guest miles: ₹1,499, 1 mile per ₹100 on ordinary spend, 3 on etihad.com, 2 abroad, complimentary Silver tier from the first swipe and eight domestic lounge visits a year. It is gone. SBI's own product page carries the notice: from December 2025 the Etihad Guest SBI Cards were phased out and replaced by an SBI Card MILES product, and the Etihad cards were deactivated for use on the earlier of card activation or 31 March 2026. Holders were not grandfathered — they were migrated. We carry the page because people still search for the card and deserve a straight answer about what happened to it, and because the Etihad Guest franchise moved rather than died: BOBCARD picked up the whole thing in early 2026 with two Mastercard co-brands, and its ₹2,500 base tier earns the same 1 mile per ₹100 with a milestone ladder SBI never had. If you held this card, your miles are safe in your Etihad Guest account — only the earning stopped. Judged on its merits while it lived, it was decent and not exciting: 1% on your life in a currency worth about a rupee is fine, the Priority Pass here was a membership with zero complimentary visits attached, and 3.5% forex quietly ate the 2-miles-per-₹100 international rate it advertised.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
Here is the fee, the spend that clears it, and everything that has moved under this card since you last decided.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹1,499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹1,499/yr
The waiver ₹3,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹25,000 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹13,000 a month — ₹1,56,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹3,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹11,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹17,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹41,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹65,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
Everyday earn plus milestones, minus the fee — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
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 the numbers above are the whole of it.
What has changed under this card
- 25 Aug 2026 Vietnam Airlines Lotusmiles opens a broad SkyTeam status match — up to Elite Plus a program these points reach
- 3 Aug 2026 SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programme issuer-wide
- 30 Jun 2026 Amex India cuts Etihad Guest as an MR transfer partner a program these points reach
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
- 1 Etihad Guest Mile per ₹100 on ordinary spend — a real airline currency, not a bank point
- 3 miles per ₹100 on etihad.com and 2 per ₹100 on international spend
- Complimentary Etihad Guest Silver tier from the first transaction
- 2,500 welcome miles on paying the ₹1,499 fee, credited within 30 days
- 5,000 miles at ₹5 lakh of annual spend; a companion voucher at ₹10 lakh
- 8 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year, maximum 2 a quarter
- ₹1,499 renewal reversed on ₹3 lakh of spend in the preceding year
Watch out
- The card was deactivated on 31 March 2026 — SBI phased it out from December 2025 and issued holders an SBI Card MILES product instead
- The Priority Pass here is a $99 MEMBERSHIP with no complimentary visits attached — every international lounge entry was paid at the door
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup, which costs more than the 2 miles per ₹100 the card paid on that same spend
- Fuel earned nothing at all
- Etihad Guest miles expire 18 months after your last account activity, and since June 2024 only an Etihad or partner FLIGHT resets that clock — transfers and purchases do not
- Etihad Guest has priced awards dynamically since 2018 and there is no chart to hold it to
- No outbound transfers exist from Etihad Guest — miles earned here can only be spent inside Etihad Guest
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Etihad Guest 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 →
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹3,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹1,499 fee. A different question from the one above — earning points and counting toward a threshold are separate rules, and issuers write them separately.
Not published. SBI Card states what the Etihad Guest SBI Card earns, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹3,00,000 bar. We won't guess it from the earn table or from a sibling card: Axis published three cards' rules on one day and all three lists differed. If you hold this card and have it in writing from the issuer, send us the document and we'll source it.
Lounge access
16 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: Set A list w.e.f. 10 Jan 2026; the card itself was deactivated 31 Mar 2026
Opens 16 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 8 airports — 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.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
There is no way in. SBI's own product record has carried the notice since December 2025: the Etihad Guest SBI Cards were phased out, holders were issued an SBI Card MILES product, and the Etihad cards were deactivated for usage on activation of the new card or on 31 March 2026, whichever came first. The card was never available online in its last years either — SBI's record flags it isOnline "no", meaning branch-sourced only. If you want to earn Etihad Guest miles from Indian card spend today, BOBCARD's two co-brands are the only route left.
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.
- 25 Aug 2026Vietnam Airlines Lotusmiles opens a broad SkyTeam status match — up to Elite PlusNo standing public status-match route from most Indian-held airline and hotel tiers into a SkyTeam Elite Plus card → A paid Lotusmiles status match accepting ~47 airline programmes (Air India Maharaja Club included) and 18 hotel chains, granting 12 months up to Platinum
Lotusmiles will match tier status from roughly 47 airline programmes — Lufthansa, Swiss, Etihad, Emirates, BA, Qatar, Singapore, Qantas and Air India's Maharaja Club — plus 18 hotel chains (Marriott, Accor, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, matched through Gold only), for a flat 12-month grant with no stated flying requirement. The SkyTeam translation is the point: Titanium and Gold confer SkyTeam Elite, and Platinum confers SkyTeam Elite Plus — priority everything plus a guest into SkyTeam lounges across the network. Priced USD 129–359 by tier matched. For an Indian reader sitting on an underused hotel or airline status, it is one of the cheaper routes to a year of Elite Plus; match near a renewal and treat it as a one-year sprint.
- 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
- 30 Jun 2026Amex India cuts Etihad Guest as an MR transfer partner
- 25 Jun 2026Aeroplan re-cut the partner column of its Flight Reward Chart — India to Asia business up 25%
- 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
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 · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 5 of them, each with the day we read it
- official SBI's own product record — the phase-out notice, ₹1,499 reversed at ₹3 lakh, 1/2/3 miles per ₹100, 2,500 welcome miles, Silver tier and 8 domestic lounge visits
- official Key Fact Statement — the fee table still carries Etihad Guest SBI Card at 1,499 annual and 1,499 renewal
- official SBI's product page for the card
- official SBI's lounge page — "Etihad Guest SBI Card" is a Set A card, so from 10 Jan 2026 its eight domestic visits ran at 16 named lounges in 8 cities and nowhere else
- community Live From A Lounge on BOBCARD taking over the Etihad Guest franchise as the SBI co-brands closed on 31 March 2026