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Axis Bank Vistara Infinite Credit Card

Get 4 Business Class Flight Tickets + 5 Economy Tickets on Vistara for INR 11,800/- All Inclusive!

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invest 11,800 INR, Get 4 Business Class Flight Tickets in India

My most recent post entitled How to Score an Annual Vacation for Free using Credit Card Points in India gained a lot of traction last week thanks to my friends like Rishabh who were happily sharing the same on social media. As promised in my last post, I’d like to share with you today details about the Axis Bank Vistara Infinite Credit Card that helps you score 4 Business Class Flight Tickets and 5 Economy Tickets for a mere investment of 11,800 INR. Lets dig into the specifics.

Benefits of Axis Vistara Infinite Credit Card

This is a great card for people who have an appetite to spend 7,50,000 INR on their credit card in a year. You can chose to spend money on any transaction and every transaction which will help you score frequent flyer miles on one of India’s favourite airlines – Vistara.  Let’s get into the specifics of how this card works and what are the benefits one can derive out of this.

Get 4 Complimentary Business Class Tickets on Vistara: As soon as you sign up for the Axis Vistara Infinite Credit Card, you’re issued one complimentary business class ticket. There after, every time you cross a total cumulative spend of 2,50,000 on your card, you keep getting business class tickets. In a year, you can get a maximum of 4 business class tickets. What that means is, if you spend 7,50,000 on your card in a year, you end up getting 4 complimentary business class tickets on Vistara. How cool is that! 🙂

Score points every time you swipe your card and get 5 free Economy Flight tickets in a year in addition to your 4 Complimentary Business Class Tickets: Accrue Club Vistara Points on every transaction. What that means is for every online and offline transaction you make, you earn 6 CV Points for every INR 200 you spend on your Axis Bank Vistara Infinite Credit Card. These points can later be redeemed to either buy Vistara flight tickets or get a cabin upgrade of your choice. Lets take a moment to understand what this means. Say you spend 7,50,000 INR on this card in one year – what that does is, it helps you score 22,500 Club Vistara Points. Also, if you end up spending 100,000 INR in your first three months, Vistara awards you 10,000 Bonus Miles. With a total of 32,500 points, you can score 5 free Economy tickets per below with these points. For a Bangalore Delhi Economy ticket, you need to spend 6,000 miles. Spend 30,000 miles and you can easily score 5 one way tickets in economy on Vistara! 🙂

Economy Award Ticket on Vistara using Axis Vistara Infinite Credit Card

Upgrade to Club Vistara Gold from Day Zero: If you’re a frequent flyer, you realise that business travel can *get to you* at times. There’s just so many queues at the airport right from the time you check in to head to security to then wait for boarding the aircraft, get a seat of your choice, land, disembark and then wait for your bags to arrive at the baggage terminal. This card bumps you up straight to Club Vistara Gold from the day you get the card. What that means is – even if you don’t fly Vistara a lot, you still remain a Gold member throughout the year. Benefits include the below:

  • Priority Airport Check-In: Irrespective of the class of ticket you’ve purchased, whether it is economy / premium economy / business class, everytime you’d like to check in, you check in straight from the business class counter and don’t have to wait in the long economy queue.
  • Increased Baggage Allowance: When you’re flying any airline in India, you can carry 15 Kgs of luggage. By being a Club Vistara Gold Member, you’d now get 10 kgs additional when you fly. So every time you fly, you can carry 25 Kgs of luggage! 🙂
  • Priority Boarding: Often boarding the aircraft is time consuming as you have to stand in a long queue – as people flock to board as soon as the airline commences boarding. With the Club Vistara Gold Membership, you can board via the separate business class lane – either before boarding commences for economy or at any time of your choice.
  • Complimentary Lounge Access: Irrespective of whether you fly Economy / Premium Economy / Business, everytime you fly Vistara, you’d get complimentary lounge access across the country. Lounge access will not apply only if you’ve bought a Vistara Lite ticket.
  • Priority Baggage Handling: With this, your checked-in bag will arrive at the luggage belt in the first batch – along with the bags of the business class flyers – so you can quickly exit the airport to your final destination. Big time saving feature this one.
  • 3 Upgrade Vouchers: This is one of my favourite features of the Club Vistara Gold Membership. Each voucher allows you to upgrade your ticket to the next available cabin. So if you’re flying economy, on presenting your voucher, you get upgraded to premium economy. If you’re flying premium economy, present your voucher and you get upgraded to business class. How awesome is that! You’ll get three such upgrade vouchers that you can use over a one year period commencing from the date of the issue of the vouchers to you.

Other Benefits on the Card: There are tons of other benefits on the card, like free lounge access when you’re not flying Vistara, complimentary golf access, complimentary insurance in the form of Air Accident Cover of upto INR 2,50,00,000, Purchase Protection Cover upto INR 1,00,000, Lost Card Liability upto 100% your credit limit and more. Details here.

Bottom Line: Invest 11,800/- upfront, spend 7.5 Lacs in a year and get: 

  • 4 Complimentary Business Class Tickets
  • 5 Complimentary Economy Tickets
  • Club Vistara Gold Membership
  • 3 Upgrade Vouchers
  • Lounge Access Across the Country 
  • Lots More

Did you enjoy this post? Moreover, how likely are you to get this card? Please chime in with your comments! 🙂

How to score an Annual Vacation for Free using Credit Card Points in India!

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Score your annual vacation for free using credit card points

For long, I’ve been an active user of credit cards. I got my first credit card way back in 2006. However, my usage was sporadic and predominantly for international travel. Until a couple of years back, when I figured credit cards are a great tool to unlock a bundle of rewards. I’ve been using them for the last couple of years to pay for my annual vacations. A lot of my friends keep asking me – how does this work? Is scoring annual vacations for free using credit cards in India really possible? To put together how I scored my annual vacation this year in Leh for free, I thought I’d put together a post.

  • Step 1: The first step is to really understand your monthly spending pattern.
  • Step 2: Once you’ve figured that out, you need to go ahead and map it to the right credit cards available in the market.
  • Step 3: Have a clear Credit Card Usage Strategy across the year
  • Step 4: Score points by using the right card at the right merchants on a regular basis
  • Step 5: Score that vacation! 🙂

Let me start out my disclosing my Annual Credit Card Strategy for last year: April 2017 to March 2018. My credit card strategy was to use only two credit cards for all my spends across the year. These cards included:

For this particular vacation though, I relied on only one credit card – which is the HDFC Diners Black Credit Card – and I’ll restrict my post to this card today. I’ll blog about the Axis Vistara Infinite Credit Card in a few days from now outlining why it made sense for me and the benefits I scored.

HDFC Bank Diners Black Credit Card

This is a great card for those who:

  • Travel extensively
  • Shop often online
  • Have an array of international transactions month on month

Here’s how the benefits of the card stack up:

  1. Free Lounge Access Globally: The card comes with free unlimited domestic and international lounge access across the world.
  2. Gives you 33% Flat Cashback on specific online platforms on every transaction you make: I’m not kidding. For the below listed platforms, for any and every transaction you make, the card gives you a flat 33% cashback upto a maximum of 25,000 INR cash back per month. I’ve stacked them into primarily 4 categories:
  3. Flat 33% Cashback on HDFC Smart Buy Partners upto a maximum of 25,000 INR cash back per month which include:
  4. Flat 33% Cashback on All International Transactions: upto a maximum of 10,000 INR cash back per month.
  5. Other Benefits: A ton of other benefits including a fab golf program that are listed here.

Annual Fee: This card comes with an annual fee of INR 10,000 per year.

How to get the Annual Fee Waived Off on the HDFC Bank Diners Black Credit Card:

  • If you’re an active customer with HDFC Bank for a few years, often the annual charges are automatically waived off.
  • The gentleman who pitched the card to me requested me to put my Airtel Mobile Bill for automatic payment via the credit card every month and requested me to apply for an add on card on my wife’s name. He said if I opt in for the above two conditions, he’ll get the annual fee waived off. I totally opted in for it as it made sense to me.

Now that I’d got my credit card – which is the HDFC Diners Black, I began to put a structure to my spending habits month on month. I figured the below is what I spend on a regular basis month on month and basis that, the table below also outlines the amount of cash back I’ll score month on month.

diners black credit card cash back example

Like you can see on the above table, I noticed that if I were spending 34,000 INR per month, and if I spent that money at the merchants that HDFC Bank was promoting – like shop often from Flipkart and not Amazon, travel by Uber instead of Ola, book flight tickets / bus tickets via RedBus and Cleartrip instead of Makemytrip, it would get me a fabulous cash back of flat 33% month on month – which meant that I would make at-least 1,20,000 INR in cash back in one year. On every other transaction, HDFC Bank Diners Black Credit Card gives you a flat cash back of 3.3% – which again keeps getting added to your cashback total.

I ended up spending a little more than the above mentioned amounts on my HDFC Bank Diners Black Credit Card last month and therefore had more than 1,20,000 INR in points. The best part of the HDFC Bank Diners Black Credit Card is that it 1 point = 1 rupee. When planning our annual vacation, my wife wanted to head to Leh as she’d never been there. I’d last been there on a trip back in 2010 and couldn’t wait to get back there too. So in December 2017 last year, I begun planning for my annual vacation this year – in April 2018.

The Annual Vacation – Bangalore to Leh to Delhi to Bangalore

I was able to book return flight tickets on Jet Airways for my wife and me from Bangalore to Leh and back – with a stop in Delhi for a couple of days for 24,000 INR all inclusive. I waned to ensure that we stayed at one of the best properties in Leh – so we ended up picking the best place in Leh per my knowledge – The Grand Dragon Ladakh.

The Grand Dragon Ladakh

The Grand Dragon Ladakh Restaurant

Aadil and Saniya at Pangong Lake

After wrapping up Leh, we headed to Delhi to spend a couple of days there – stayed at the Luxurious The Leela Ambience Convention Hotel, indulged in some shopping and of-course, sampled the incredible food that Delhi has to offer.

As you can see, the staff at Leela Ambiance Convention Hotel, Delhi were quick to realise Saniya and me were celebrating our wedding anniversary and they surprised us with a celebration in our room upon arrival.

What made this entire trip special was the fact that the entire trip, our flight tickets from Bangalore to Delhi to Leh to Delhi to Bangalore and back, our accommodation at The Grand Dragon Ladakh and our accommodation at The Leela Ambiance Convention Hotel, Delhi was completely paid for by the points I earned on the HDFC Bank Diners Black Credit Card.

So there you have it – it is no myth that your credit card can pay for your annual vacation. So long as you have a planned credit card spend strategy for the year, so long as you’ve mapped it to the credit card you’ve chosen based on your strategy and the rewards it unlocks, so long as you’re disciplined in spending at the right merchant to get you the right deal, its incredibly simple how amazing things can happen. Question to you then, where are you planning to head to your your next annual vacation? And whats your credit card miles earning / point acquisition strategy? Whats your favorite Credit Card Program? Would love hear from you! 🙂