Akasa Air launches Elevate, its first frequent-flyer programme
Four years to the day after its first flight, Akasa Air shipped a loyalty programme: four tiers, 8 to 14 Elevate Points per ₹100 by tier plus 4 bonus points for booking direct, and retroactive credit for flights since 1 April 2026. The redemption value is unpublished, so there is nothing to price yet.
Akasa Air turned four on 7 August 2026 and marked the anniversary by fixing its most conspicuous gap: it was India’s only scheduled carrier without a frequent-flyer programme. Akasa Elevate is now live.
What it pays
Four tiers on a rolling 365-day window, and the earn rate steps up with the tier:
| Tier | Qualification (rolling 365 days) | Elevate Points per ₹100 | Booking direct |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bronze | automatic on enrolment | 8 | 12 |
| Silver | ₹75,000 eligible spend or 6 eligible flights | 10 | 14 |
| Gold | ₹1,25,000 or 15 flights | 12 | 16 |
| Platinum | ₹2,50,000 or 30 flights | 14 | 18 |
The direct-booking bonus is a flat 4 points per ₹100 at every tier — Akasa buying its way off the OTAs, and the single clearest instruction in the whole programme. Points accrue on base fares and on ancillaries: seat selection, meals, baggage. For a low-cost carrier that is the honest design, because ancillaries are where the revenue actually is.
Two details worth having. Qualification is spend or segments, whichever you hit first, so a commuter on cheap Bengaluru–Hyderabad hops reaches Silver on six flights without spending ₹75,000. And enrolment is retroactive: anything you flew from 1 April 2026 onward can be claimed once you sign up, which means a good number of people are already sitting on a tier they haven’t collected.
What it does not pay, yet
Akasa has published the earn side in full and the redemption side not at all. There is no stated value per Elevate Point, no award chart, no cash-plus-points table. Until that number exists, everything above is a rate of accumulation with no denominator — 18 points per ₹100 could be 4.5% back or 1.8%, and nobody outside Akasa knows which.
There are also no partners. No hotel chain, no other airline, and — the part that matters most on this desk — no Indian credit card or bank programme transfers points into Elevate. Not HDFC, not Axis EDGE Miles, not SBI, not Amex. If that changes it will be a real event; today it is a blank column.
Our take
We are not putting a value on Elevate Points and we are not adding it to the valuation index, because a programme that has not published what its currency buys cannot be priced honestly, and a made-up number is worse than an empty cell. What we will say is that the earn ladder is unusually generous for a low-cost carrier on paper, and that the direct-booking bonus makes Akasa’s own site the only sensible place to buy an Akasa ticket from now on.
Watch for the redemption chart. That is the announcement that turns this from a press release into a currency.