Prologue

The ₹4 lakh voucher that moved to ₹7 lakh

Published 29 September 2026

Fifteen days after Vishal Rajpal paid to renew his American Express Platinum Travel Credit Card, American Express rewrote it.

Rajpal is a 49-year-old chartered accountant in Delhi. For roughly thirty months he had held the card and used it the way its designers intended: hotel bookings and flight tickets, about twice a month, for official travel. The card's promise was specific. Spend ₹4 lakh in a year and you earned 25,000 Membership Rewards points and a ₹10,000 Taj Experiences e-gift card. He had redeemed Taj vouchers across the country the previous year. He paid his renewal fee expecting the same deal.

On 4 February 2026, Amex notified cardholders of what The Economic Times called "a significant overhaul" of the Platinum Travel card, effective 9 March. Under the new structure, the same ₹4 lakh of annual spend yields 10,000 points - down from 25,000 - and the Taj voucher at that level disappears entirely. To earn the same ₹10,000 Taj voucher, a cardholder must now spend ₹7 lakh a year. The goalpost did not inch. It moved three quarters of the way down the field.

"About 15 days after I had paid to renew my card, Amex devalued it," Rajpal told ET. "It felt like in the middle of playing a T20 match, after 10 overs, the rules were changed!"

American Express's response, carried in the same report, is worth reading in full, because it is the template every issuer now uses: "We regularly review our cards to ensure they continue to deliver strong value aligned with evolving cardmember needs... the Platinum Travel Credit Card continues to deliver compelling overall value beyond any single benefit or milestone." The company also noted that the new structure automates milestone crediting - previously, roughly half the bonus points required a manual request by phone or chat, a friction that reliably shrank redemption - and that "all eligible spends count toward annual spend milestones, with no exclusions across categories such as fuel, insurance, and utilities."

Both things can be true at once. The new system is cleaner. And it delivers less. A cardholder spending ₹4 lakh a year loses 15,000 points and a ₹10,000 voucher. Amex, whose 13.4 lakh outstanding cards as of December 2025 make it the leader among foreign banks in India per RBI data cited by ET, priced that trade-off and chose it.

Kamal Narang, 62, a retired photographer, made the quieter choice available to a cardholder: he left. After nearly fifteen years swiping an Amex Gold card - he had even added his wife as an authorized user - he deactivated it in 2025. "Its rewards kept getting devalued over the last 2-3 years," he told ET. "Worse yet, many shops reject Amex cards. Only some luxury showrooms like Titan and Tanishq offered good discounts, but even that had tapered off."

One card, one voucher, two customers. This would be a small story except for what surrounds it. In the same weeks, ICICI Bank stripped complimentary movie tickets from its Platinum cards and capped monthly rewards at ₹20,000 of transactions on several products. SBI Card halved complimentary airport-lounge visits on five popular variants. Scapia, the travel card built on Federal Bank, doubled the monthly spend needed to unlock lounge entry. Axis Bank told customers their points would expire thirty days after closing a card. And HDFC Bank - the country's largest private lender - tried to gut the reward multipliers on its flagship Infinia card, then retreated after a fierce online backlash, the only reversal in three years of notices.

The Economic Times, cataloguing these moves in March 2026, gave the phenomenon a name: "reward fatigue". This file gives it a ledger.

"It felt like in the middle of playing a T20 match, after 10 overs, the rules were changed!"Vishal Rajpal, Amex Platinum Travel cardholder, to The Economic Times (3 March 2026)