ICICI gated Adani One and MakeMyTrip lounge access on 1 July

Since 1 January 2025, complimentary domestic lounge access on an ICICI credit card has not been something you hold — it is something you earn, quarter by quarter, with ₹75,000 of spend in the preceding quarter. Nine cards were carved out of that rule. Three of the carve-outs had an expiry date printed beside them, and it has passed.

ICICI’s Most Important Terms and Conditions — the 46-page PDF headed “Last updated on Aug 2nd, 2026” — lists the exempt cards like this:

ICICI Bank Diamant Credit Card · ICICI Bank Emeralde Private Metal Credit Card · ICICI Bank Emeralde Private Credit Card · ICICI Bank Emeralde Credit Card · ICICI Bank Emirates Emeralde Credit Card · Adani One ICICI Bank Signature Credit Card (valid till Jun 30, 2026) · Adani One ICICI Bank Platinum Credit Card (valid till Jun 30, 2026) · MakeMyTrip ICICI Bank Credit Card (valid till Jun 30, 2026) · Times Black ICICI Bank Credit Card

And then, immediately below, removes any ambiguity about what happens next:

The following Credit Card variants will 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: Adani One ICICI Bank Signature Credit Card · Adani One ICICI Bank Platinum Credit Card · MakeMyTrip ICICI Bank Credit Card

What each card actually loses

None of the three loses a lounge visit. All three lose the certainty of getting one.

MakeMyTrip ICICI Bank Credit Card — two domestic visits a quarter plus one international a year. The domestic pair now depends on the previous quarter’s spend. This is the sharpest of the three, because the card’s whole proposition is travel: it is sold to someone who books flights and hotels on MakeMyTrip, not to someone who runs ₹25,000 a month of general spend through a co-brand.

Adani One ICICI Bank Signature — four domestic visits a quarter, sixteen a year, plus two international via Priority Pass. Sixteen lounge visits is the single best reason to hold this card, given the points are trapped inside an airport app with no transfer partners and no cash-out. Put a ₹3 lakh annual spend condition on the lounges and a large part of what you are paying ₹5,000 for becomes conditional.

Adani One ICICI Bank Platinum — two domestic visits a quarter, eight a year, for a ₹750 fee. Eight lounge visits for ₹750 was one of the cheapest lounge trades on the Indian market. It now costs ₹750 plus ₹3 lakh of routed spend, which is a different product.

Read the exclusion list before you plan around the gate

The ₹75,000 is not “any ₹75,000”. ICICI excludes, in its own words, rent payment, government payment, education payment, credit balance refund, joining fee, annual fee, late payment fee, interest charges, principal amount, DCC fee, reward redemption handling fee, reversals, cancelled transactions and EMI transactions from the spend calculation. A quarter in which you put ₹1.2 lakh of school fees and a converted EMI on the card can still leave you short of the bar.

The quarters are also offset, not calendar-aligned: ICICI’s own illustration counts spend from the 26th of one month to the 25th three months later, so the money that unlocks your October–December lounges was spent between 26 June and 25 September.

The part that should not be true

ICICI’s public “Upcoming changes to Credit Card features and charges” page — the page a cardholder would actually check — still prints the old exemption list. Re-read on 28 August 2026, it names MakeMyTrip ICICI Bank Credit Cards among the cards to which the updated lounge criterion does not apply, with no expiry date and no mention of 1 July 2026. The Adani One cards appear nowhere on that page’s exemption list at all.

So on the same afternoon, ICICI’s regulatory disclosure says MakeMyTrip holders need ₹75,000 a quarter to see a lounge, and ICICI’s customer-facing changes page says they do not. Both documents are live on icici.bank.in. Only one of them is the MITC.

Our take

We take the MITC. It is the regulated disclosure, it is dated 2 August 2026 against a marketing page with no date at all, and it is the more recent of the two by any reading. Our card pages for all three already price the lounge access as gated; this post exists because the change never reached our tracker, and because a reader checking ICICI’s own site would be told the opposite.

The broader point is the one worth carrying away. ICICI has spent two years converting lounge access from a card feature into a spend reward, and it is finishing the job at the edges — not with an announcement, but by letting three dated exemptions lapse in a footnote. Nine cards were carved out; six remain, and the cheapest of them carries a ₹10,000 annual fee. If you hold a lounge card below that price, assume the gate applies to you and check the MITC, not the product page.

Sources: ICICI Bank, Most Important Terms and Conditions (PDF, “Last updated on Aug 2nd, 2026”; retrieved 28 August 2026) · ICICI Bank, Upcoming changes to Credit Card features and charges (re-read 28 August 2026).