Citi Prestige strips Etihad Guest Gold and partner perks

Citi Prestige cardholders in India woke up poorer today. Effective April 1, 2016, the complimentary Etihad Guest Gold membership is gone, and a string of hotel-chain and spa discounts went with it.

Those weren’t filler perks. Free Etihad Guest Gold plus the partner discounts were a big part of what made Prestige one of the more genuinely useful super-premium cards on the market — the benefits you could actually point to when justifying the card. Strip them and the justification gets a lot thinner.

The timing completes an ugly hat-trick: the same week delivered the HDFC Diners 10x closure and the IndusInd JetPrivilege weekend-bonus cut. Three cuts, one week, and an April Fool’s Day effective date that no Indian points geek will find funny — burned three times over.

Our take: super-premium cards live or die on perks like airline status, and Prestige just deleted its best one. If Etihad Guest Gold was your reason for holding this card, that reason no longer exists — do the fee math again.