We have written extensively about the HDFC Diners 10x program. HDFC Bank Diners Club 10X Rewards were my favourite kind of reward currency primarily due to some offbeat transfer partners they provided in India. The list went away in 2016, but still, I look at it as a 33% cashback card, with all the cashback going towards travel.
HDFC Bank 10X Rewards
The list of 10X partners frequently gets updated, but no major shakeups, until now that is. The focus has been on travel & e-commerce. They initially put out a year-long list of partners, but then recalled it, and started to extend the date of the promotion by the months. Here are the announcements for April, May, June & July 2016. Then, it got extended through March 2017 but applied caps on reward earning per month, and a one-month extension through April 2017. In May, they put a new list valid through July 2017. Subsequently, they added all categories of SmartBuy on the list as of July 2017. In the last reveal, they knocked off the travel category. You can now access this category through SmartBuy which is for everyone who is an HDFC Bank Credit Card Holder.
Yesterday, HDFC Bank confirmed that SmartBuy would continue through December 2018. This is in line with their previous line of thinking, where they extend the promotion through September 2018.
There is not much that is new in the list of partners just revealed, except they added SOTC and Swiggy dropped out. Here are the partners, including SOTC which just got added. Pro Tip, they are good as a ticket booker as well rather than just as a holiday booking agent:
This list would be valid through December 2018. For Treebo, only online transactions will get 10X points, not pay at hotel.Uber transactions done abroad would also now start counting for 10X Rewards.
Just as a recap, you earn the following points on your cards with the various variants on the merchants mentioned above:
- Rewardz: 3 points/INR 150 + 27 points/INR 150 bonus [Total 30 points/INR 150]. Monetary Value is INR 9 [6% cashback]
- Premium/Club Miles: 4 points/INR 150 + 36 points/INR 150 bonus [Total 40 points/INR 150]. Monetary Value is INR 20 [13% cashback]
- Black: 5 points/INR 150 + 45 points/INR 150 bonus [Total 50 points/INR 150]. Monetary Value of INR 50 [33% cashback]
- Here is the cap installed on the number of points you can earn per statement cycle this year.
- Rewardz: 2,000 points
- Premium/Club Miles: 5,000 points
- Black: 25,000 points
The 10x points are not applicable to the HDFC Bank JetPrivilege co-branded Diners card. There is also an extension on the 10X for Smartbuy and 10X for International Spend and I’ll be writing about them separately.
What do you think of these changes to the HDFC Bank Diners Club 10X program?
Do i need to register on Smartbuy before making a purchase on Flipkart?
I am planning to get my HDFC Diners . The 10X rewards are not available for HDFC Diners Jetpriviledge so is a fair to say Black is a better option. I am platinum tier at JP & think can meet requirement of for black. What is a better card then ? I was considering Jet privilege version for the tier points.
I’d have taken two cards, Diners Black and JetPrivilege Signature. HDFC allows two cards and Diners, non-Diners are two separate product upgrade paths.
They no longer allow 2 cards.
Smartbuy is till March 20019. Its given on smartbuy website.
Looks like there is a change in policy for 10x bonus for the International transactions — “Earlier International 10X Rewards offer – Earn 10X Reward Points on all international transactions (Ecommerce and POS) done between 1 September 2017 till 30 September 2018. From 1 October 2018, the offer is valid only on international POS transactions.”