The long-standing Dreamfolks saga will finally come to an end. The rising star of the lounge access world, the company used to provide lounge access to over 20 banks’ customers in India, and just today, it has pulled itself out of the business altogether.
Dreamfolks exits the Domestic Lounge Access Business.
Dreamfolks, as per its last quarterly results, had all 76 airport lounges in India on its platform, as well as over 20 card issuers, including major ones such as ICICI Bank and Axis Bank. However, last year, they experienced an incident where the Mumbai lounges were inaccessible for Dreamfolks’ served banks, which was attributed to an IT outage. This was the start of a chain reaction.
It is said that Adani had approached them for a takeover, but they were not interested in the offer. So Adani built its own platform to offer lounge access to lounges, and got GMR/Encalm on board as well. Travel Food Services is now also going the same way with EliteAssist. The first to cut ties with Dreamfolks were biggies Axis Bank and ICICI Bank. And then there were others.
In August 2025, Dreamfolks had been served notices by Adani Digital and Semolina Kitchens (both Adani entities offer and operate lounges across India at Adani Airports’ owned Lounges) for discontinuation of their lounges on the Dreamfolks platform as of September 16, 2025. Encalm (which offers Lounges at GMR-owned airports) also wanted to be gone, but they gave a slightly longer timeline. Travel Food Services, which has a role to play in 37 lounges operated in India, also wanted out in early September 2025.
Today, Dreamfolks, in a late evening stock exchange filing, announced that it has discontinued offering airport lounge services in India, effective immediately. You can read the note below or on the exchange website.
This means that if you turn up with a bank or airline provision where Dreamfolks was the intermediary, tomorrow morning, don’t expect it to work. The following banks and networks still power their lounge access via Dreamfolks (as per the Dreamfolks website):
- Visa
- Diners Club
- RuPay
- MasterCard
- HDFC Bank
- IDFC First Bank (recently shifted to EliteAssist)
- AU Small Finance Bank
- Dhanalaxmi Bank
- SBI Card
- Kotak
Then again, this chaos will persist for a few days, and you would do well to sidestep the Lounge Wars by obtaining a card such as Scapia, which allows you to dine for INR 500/1000 at various Indian airports without having to wait in airport lounge queues altogether. You can also see if your bank and lounge are on LoungeOne.AI.
Bottomline
Dreamfolks, in a not-so-surprising move, has decided to exit the lounge access business across India after key suppliers Adani and Encalm cut off their supplies for lounge access. This comes into effect immediately on September 16, 2025. That means you might not have lounge access with a Dreamfolks-powered credit card issuer anymore when you turn up tomorrow at the Airport Lounge.
What do you make of this situation? Sign up for a Scapia Card and get Lounge Access or upto INR 1000 worth of Dining at Airport Outlets.
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Makes sense for DreamFolks.
Winning domestically will tough now and focusing abroad lets them leverage the tech and business they’ve already built, with better margins hopefully since volume could be significantly lower.