Frequent flyers have reason to smile as banks and airliners are offering a plethora of co-branded credit cards, which offer freebies and also free airline tickets.

ICICI Bank [Get Quote], in association with Air Deccan, recently launched the ICICI Bank, Air Deccan gold card. Citibank has a co-branded credit card with Jet Airways [Get Quote], Indian Airlines with American Express Card and Air Sahara with Standard Chartered Gold Card.

On your ICICI Bank, Air Deccan card, for every Rs 30,000 worth of tickets purchased you get a Rs 3,000 free-ticket voucher. To avail of this facility, customer would have to criss-cross at least more than 10 times.

If you have a Citibank Jet Gold card, which costs Rs 2,000 a year in fees, you get 3 JPMiles on every Rs 100 spend and access to the club premiere lounge. At the time of card issuance, 3,000 welcome JPMiles are added.

Once you garner 4,500 JPMiles you can get upgrade vouchers to the business class. You are entitled to a free ticket once you accumulate 10,000 JP miles: the sector and the class can be decided by the customer.

The Air Sahara Standard Chartered Gold card has an offer wherein you may be able to fly your spouse and two children for free to the most-awaited vacation annually. The only cost you would have to incur is the tax charged on the ticket. The card also offers a 5 per cent discount on all tickets (full fare and Apex).

In addition to this, the customer gets automatically enrolled for the Cosmos frequent flier miles. Under the programme, the customer earns 1 mile on every Rs 100 spend on the card. Customers can redeem Cosmos miles for free Air Sahara tickets.

Comparing the various co-branded cards, the Indian Airline American Express card offers the best deal as it offers a 10 per cent discount on full fare economy and business class tickets -- every time, on any domestic or overseas Indian airlines routes.

Though co-branded airline cards have benefited frequent travellers they restrict the choice of your airline. In this respect, the ABN Amro smart gold and HSBC Gold credit card offer travel benefits to its customers across airlines.

The ABN Amro smart gold card gives you an option of converting your smart reward points into smart miles and redeeming them against free tickets (any domestic or international airline), hotel bookings, travel packages and car rentals. It also has an exclusive arrangement with International Travel House [Get Quote].

While on the ABN Amro Freedom Credit Card you can avail discounts of up to 3.5 per cent on domestic tickets and 5 per cent on international tickets (delivered at your doorstep) that are bought through SITA World Travel, a part of Kuoni group.