It’s never a great sign when a loyalty partnership quietly fades out without much fanfare. And yet, that’s roughly what’s happening with the Zomato × Air India Maharaja Club tie-up, which officially closes on May 1, 2026. If you’ve been earning or burning miles through this partnership, the clock is almost out.
Air India Maharaja Club and Zomato partnered in 2025
When Air India relaunched its revamped Maharaja Club frequent-flyer programme under the Tata Group’s ownership, it came out swinging with a series of partnerships designed to make the programme feel relevant to everyday life — not just to road warriors logging 100,000 miles a year.
One of the tie-ups was with Zomato, which partnered with Air India Maharaja Club in the aftermath of Swiggy partnering with IndiGo’s BluChip (subsequently with Marriott Bonvoy as well and an announced but not live partnership with Etihad Guest).
Under the partnership, Zomato users could link their Maharaja Club accounts and earn Air India miles on eligible Zomato orders. For a certain type of points enthusiast — the kind who obsessively accumulates miles across every possible channel — this was genuinely useful. A few miles here, a few there, and suddenly a domestic redemption starts looking more achievable.
The Closure: What We Know
Effective May 1, 2026, the Zomato × Air India Maharaja Club partnership comes to an end. Members who have been earning miles through Zomato orders will no longer accrue Maharaja Club points via this channel after that date. This is the message you see when you fire up the Zomato app these days.
Neither Air India nor Zomato has provided a public explanation, which is typical for loyalty partnership dissolutions. These things end for any number of reasons: commercial terms that didn’t pencil out, lower-than-expected enrollment conversions, shifting strategic priorities on either side, or simply a mutual decision that the partnership had run its course.
But most likely, this is an evolution at the end of Zomato. The platform struggles to keep up when things start to take off, which can become cost centres in the future, as we saw when the RBL Bank x Zomato credit card was pulled, and now this.
On Air India’s end, the Maharaja Club continues to evolve. The program has been gradually improving its earning-and-redemption proposition.
Bottomline
The Zomato × Air India Maharaja Club partnership was an interesting experiment in making a traditional airline loyalty programme feel current and everyday. It wasn’t the deepest partnership in the industry, and it started as a response to Swiggy, which continues to partner with IndiGo BluChip. And now, it goes away on May 1, 2026, just eight months after launch.
What are your thoughts on the Zomato × Air India Maharaja Club closure? Drop them in the comments below.
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