Take wing with co-branded cards

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, in association with Air Deccan, recently launched the ICICI Bank, Air Deccan gold card. Citibank has a co-branded credit card with Jet Airways, 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.

Card	Fee	Key benefits
ICICI Bank Deccan Card	Annual fee Rs 950. Life time membership Rs 1,995	(EMI) schemes for booking air tickets and travel packages. A chance to win five free return tickets through a draw every month. Insurance cover against fraud
Air Sahara Standrad Chartered Gold Card	Rs 2,500	5% discount. Access to Air Sahara Business Royale airport lounges. Priority check-in and excess baggage allowance. Free business class upgrades. Free ticket for spouse and two children annually
Jet Citibank Card	Rs 2,000	Check-in at Club Premiere Counters. Complimentary acess to Club Premiere lounges. Personal accident insurance. Free baggage insurance.
Indian Airlines Amex Gold Card	Rs 5,900	25% discount on business class and 10% discount on economy class.
Indian Airlines Amex green Card	Rs 3,750	10% discount. 1 free upgrade to the business class. 1 business class upgrade voucher for every Rs 50,000 worth of IA ticket. Accident insurance up to 50 lakhs. Convert every-ay purchases into air miles.
ABM Amro Freedom Card	Rs 595	3.5% discount and 5% discount on domestic tickets and international tickets that are bought through SITA Travels.
ABM Amro Smart Gold Card	Rs 2,000	Converting reward points to mile redeeming against free tickets, hotel bookings, travel packages and car rentals.
HSBC Gold Card		3% off on domestic ticket. 4.5% on international tickets. 5% off on all international and domestic leisure packages.

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.

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.

The HSBC Gold credit card offers its customers 3 per cent off on all domestic airline tickets and 4.5 per cent off on all international airline tickets.