Amex Platinum Travel kills Flipkart redemption, devalues Taj by 20%
The India Points Devaluation Index
FY2026: what the programmes took
April 2025 – March 2026, closed and frozen. 52 dated changes to Indian card and loyalty programmes, each one sourced, each one on the tracker. This page is the arithmetic over them — and the ₹ line underneath, which is deliberately the more conservative of the two.
the denominators, and what this edition cannot see fold that back up
Method v1.0 · window 2025-04-01 to 2026-03-31 inclusive (2025-03-31 exclusive) · the method · the series
FY2026 · April 2025 – March 2026 · cut share
78.9%
40 cuts against 12 gains — 71.7 severity points against 19.2, at the weights this desk publishes. One cut every 9.1 days across the period's 365. Among the 4 financial years in this archive carrying at least 20 logged changes, FY2026 ranks first.
52
changes logged — the share's denominator
−₹600
on 10,000 points in each of 69 currencies
1
currency-move quantified (1 event · 0 re-mark)
27
of the changes were outright devaluations
- Two denominators, and they are not interchangeable. The share counts events: one change is one event however many currencies it moved. The rupee line counts currency-moves against a basket of 69 currencies. Nothing on this page mixes them.
- 95 currencies are excluded from this edition's basket because this desk had not indexed them when the period opened on 2025-04-01. They are left out and counted, never interpolated — a value we did not hold is not a value we can average.
- The window is bounded by EFFECTIVE dates. A change announced inside this period but landing after it belongs to a later edition; the ones that did are listed at the bottom of this page so the gap is visible rather than silent.
What a point was worth, before and after
Every currency in this edition's basket whose ₹-per-point house value changed inside the window. "Event" means a dated tracker change moved it; "re-mark" means this desk re-priced it — an FX peg drifting, or a re-anchoring against consensus — with no single event behind it. Cards and routes are exposure CONTEXT, printed so you can re-weight by hand; the index itself weights every currency once.
| Currency | Open | Close | Change | ₹ / 10,000 pts | What moved it | Exposure |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer | ₹1.16 | ₹1.10 | −5.2% | −₹600 | Nov 2025 event — KrisFlyer devalues premium and Star Alliance awards | 2 cards |
Every change in the window
All 52 of them, in the order they took effect, with the severity weight each contributed to the share above. Cuts and gains both — an index that counted only the cuts could only ever go one way, which is propaganda, not measurement. Each row links to its bracket on the tracker, where the source lives.
devaluation 27fee 4lounge 6partner 7buff 2launch 6
YES lounge gate triples to ₹1 lakh on Marquee and Reserv
Government and ad spends stop earning on 13 YES cards
Club Vistara SBI PRIME drops its ticket ladder and waives the renewal fee instead
Club Vistara SBI drops its ticket vouchers and waives the renewal fee instead
IndiGo BluChip and Accor ALL agree two-way points conversion
Vistara Infinite goes free, and loses the tier membership and every ticket voucher
Vistara Signature goes free, and loses the tier membership and every ticket voucher
The base Axis Vistara card goes free, and loses its renewal and milestone tickets
Kotak guts Privy League Signature and pulls it from sale
Kotak's June-2025 fee wave washes over the premium deck
Miles & More goes dynamic on Lufthansa Group metal
the other 40 changes in FY2026
AU, YES and IndusInd points open transfers to Maharaja Club
Amex stops earning MR points on fuel
Amex tightens MRCC's monthly bonus and devalues Gold Collection
Axis caps the Magnus 35-per-₹200 tier at your credit limit
HDFC slaps 1% fees on rent, wallet loads and gaming spend
HDFC swaps daily insurance-reward caps for tighter monthly ones
RBL gates domestic lounges behind ₹35k a quarter
SBI Card pulls free air accident insurance from its top cards
Unity flattens the BharatPe card's earn grid — the ₹1-₹999 band goes 0% to 2%
Taj InnerCircle–NeuPass expands to Shangri-La, oneworld and more
Air India suspends Delhi–Washington Dulles
DreamFolks exits India's domestic lounge business — the aggregator that opened every door goes dark
Federal puts a quarterly spend gate on lounge access across Signet, Imperio and Celesta
KrisFlyer devalues premium and Star Alliance awards
SBI adds 1% on third-party education and wallet loads
HDFC kills the 6E Rewards IndiGo co-brands — both tiers, and the currency with them
SBI discontinues the OLA Money card and moves holders onto a house card
RBI freezes new OneCard issuance across every partner bank
IDFC FIRST unveils Gaj, an invite-only ₹12,500 metal flagship
Business Regalia's lounge visit becomes a voucher — the swipe stops working
BOBCARD and Etihad Guest deal two co-brands — the last pipe in
IDFC FIRST launches zero-forex Diamond Reserve card
RBL bolts a 1% fee onto FASTag loads and tolls — the fifth 1% line on its charge sheet
SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees
ICICI caps transport rewards and excludes rent, tax, fuel spends
Amex India pauses Travel With Points, its travel-portal redemption
Amex retires Gyftr, moves Reward Multiplier to ShopWise
ICICI gates its BookMyShow movie perk behind quarterly spend
HDFC throttles how fast you can burn points — 5 redemptions and 50,000 points a month
J&K Bank relaunches its card range as Eminent, Platinum and Platinum Privilege
Scapia doubles the lounge bar and kills its easiest earn
Air India drops its Bengaluru and Mumbai nonstops to San Francisco
Discover and Air Dolomiti join Miles & More dynamic pricing
Paytm SBI Card stops earning on school and education spends
Paytm SBI Card SELECT stops earning on school and education spends
Amex Platinum Travel pushes its Taj voucher milestone to ₹7L
The Federal Fi credit-card programme ends and reward accrual stops
Miles & More raises Lufthansa award prices and surcharges
KrisFlyer quietly cuts its own dynamic 'Access' award rates
SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES
Announced here, landed later
Nothing in the archive was announced inside FY2026 with an effective date after it — or, more precisely, nothing whose announcement date a source actually stated. The desk records an announcement date only where a document carries one; on most rows it is honestly absent, so this list is a floor like everything else here.
How this edition was computed
The share. Every change in the window contributes its published severity weight — major 3, moderate 1.5, minor 0.6 — to the cut side or the gain side, using the same classifier the tracker's seismograph draws with. Cut share is cutLoad ÷ (cutLoad + gainLoad): here, 71.7 ÷ (71.7 + 19.2) = 78.9%.
The basket. 10,000 points of every currency this desk could value on the day the window opened — 69 of them, worth ₹6,08,800 at the open and ₹6,08,200 at the close. The basket is fixed at the open, so a currency indexed mid-period cannot move a number that is supposed to measure the market rather than our coverage.
The whole method is frozen and published at /devaluation-index/method, version 1.0 — including the two weighting schemes it refuses, why fees are in the share and out of the rupees, and the known limits of the classifier. The inputs are data/changelog.yaml and data/valuation-history.yaml, and the series is served as JSON.