Standard Chartered EaseMyTrip Credit Card

Quick verdict: Judge this card on its discounts and it is easy to justify — ₹350 buys 20% off hotels and 10% off flights on EaseMyTrip, and one booking can repay the fee many times over. Judge it on rewards and it is thin: 0.5% base, and the 2.5% accelerator deliberately excludes EaseMyTrip's own site, so you cannot collect both the discount and the bonus points on the same booking. Know which lever you are pulling and it is a cheap, useful travel companion rather than a primary card.

Co-brand cards usually work on a simple promise: spend with the partner, earn more. The Standard Chartered EaseMyTrip card inverts it, and the inversion is written plainly into the product terms rather than hidden. Understanding it is the difference between a card that quietly pays for itself and one that disappoints every statement.

The discounts are the card

Almost all of this card's value arrives at checkout, not in a points balance. Using promo code EMTSCB on EaseMyTrip's site or app:

• 20% off participating hotels — capped at ₹5,000 domestic, ₹10,000 international
• 10% off flights — capped at ₹1,000 domestic, ₹5,000 international
• ₹125 off bus tickets on bookings over ₹500

One limit sits over all of it, and Standard Chartered's product terms state it plainly: each discount category can be used only once per calendar month per card. Book two hotels in the same month and the second one pays full price; the counter resets with the calendar. Primary and supplementary cards each get their own monthly allowance, which is the one way a household can double up.

Against a ₹350 fee, the maths is still not subtle. One international hotel booking that hits the ₹10,000 cap returns nearly thirty times the annual fee. Even a modest domestic stay — ₹15,000 for a few nights, ₹3,000 back — makes the card's entire year of existence a rounding error. The fee also waives outright at ₹50,000 of annual spend, a bar most regular users clear without effort.

That is the honest case for this card, and it is a good one. It is also the whole case.

The catch: the 10x won't touch EaseMyTrip

Here is where most people misread the card. The marketing leads with 10x rewards — 10 points per ₹100. On a card named EaseMyTrip, the natural assumption is that EaseMyTrip bookings earn it.

They do not. Standard Chartered's product terms state it explicitly: the 10 points per ₹100 applies to standalone airline and hotel websites, apps and outlets — booking direct with the airline or the hotel. Bookings made on the EaseMyTrip website or app earn the 2 points per ₹100 base rate, the same as buying groceries.

The discount and the accelerator are two doors into the same room, and the card only lets you through one. Book on EaseMyTrip and take 20% off; book direct and take 2.5% in points. You will never get both on one booking.

Once you see it, the design logic is clear: the 20% discount is worth vastly more than 2.5% in points, so the bank routes you to the discount and declines to pay twice. That is defensible. What is less defensible is naming the card after the site whose bookings earn its lowest rate.

The rates themselves, with Standard Chartered's stated 1 point = ₹0.25 applied:

Two details soften and sharpen this in turn. There is no monthly cap on points, which is genuinely generous — the 2.5% on direct bookings runs as far as you spend. But the points redeem only through the 360 Rewards catalogue, with no statement-credit option, and they expire two years after being earned. A points currency you cannot cash out and that decays on a timer deserves to be spent, not hoarded. The habit of reading these clauses before applying is exactly what our guide to reading an MITC is about.

Lounge access, honestly

Two complimentary domestic lounge visits a year. That is the whole benefit, and it is worth stating what it used to be: complimentary international lounge access, within and outside India, was discontinued on 15 October 2024.

Two visits a year is a nice-to-have, not a travel plan. If lounge access is something you actually rely on, this card will not carry it — a quarterly allocation like the one on the SC Rewards card, or the far broader access on the SC Ultimate, is a different conversation. Our airport lounge access guide covers how thin these allocations have become across the market.

One more note for travellers: the forex markup here is the standard 3.5%, so this is a card for booking travel from home, not for spending abroad. If overseas swipes are part of the trip, a low-markup card belongs in the wallet alongside it — our forex markup guide explains what that 3.5% costs over a holiday.

Who it fits

This card suits someone who already books through EaseMyTrip a few times a year and wants the discount to be automatic. At ₹350, open to applicants from 18, with a waiver at ₹50,000, it is about as low-commitment as a travel card gets. Hold it as a booking tool: pull it out for EaseMyTrip checkouts, take the 20%, and think of the points as change found in a coat pocket.

It is the wrong card if you book direct with airlines and hotels by preference — in which case you are chasing a 2.5% accelerator that a broader travel card will beat — or if you want lounge access, or if you expect a co-brand to reward loyalty to its own partner. This one pays you at the till instead.

The bottom line

The SC EaseMyTrip is a discount card wearing a rewards card's clothes. Priced at ₹350 and waiving at ₹50,000, it does not need to be more than that: two hotel bookings a year and it has paid for itself several times over. Just go in knowing that the 10x on the tin is for everyone except the partner on the front of the card — and that once you know it, the card is perfectly good at the one job it actually does.