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Have been using this card for many years now. I only use it to buy petrol or diesel. As a happy coincidence, for over 10 years I have always filled up at the Indian Oil COCO outlet near my home, so this card dovetailed into my needs. Pump attendants at pumps listed by Citibank are well trained and have always used the Citibank POS machine when they see the card, the surcharge waiver is only if they use the Citibank POS machine. About once a year I tell the pump attendant and redeem my points using the same POS machine. The points add up to a nice sum that effectively subsidizes my fuel purchase by a few rupees.

On long highway trips, I carry cash. But even in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, bigger Indian Oil outlets have attendants familiar enough to use the Citibank POS machine.

thanks buddy,

Can you give me an approximate number on the savings per year. My pterol usage is approximately 70 Litres per month, so just wanted to have afair idea if with my usage can i get a substantial saving.

Regards
Dieseltuned

Works out to around 2.67%

70 liters X ₹70/liter (petrol) = ₹4,900
₹4,900 X 12 months/year = ₹58,800
4 turbo points for every ₹150 spend = 1,568 turbo points
Each turbo point = ₹1, so you get ₹1,568 back in a year!

thanks again buddy.

Seems a good amount to invest in the CC. I have 2 Indianoil bunks one of which is COCO on my route to office. seems worthwhile to try out this card.

Regards
dieseltuned

Does anyone have first hand experience of upgrading from HDFC Diners Premium card to HDFC Diners Black? How did you go about it?

I have Premium (life time free) and would like to upgrade to Black.

Which credit card is recommended for discounts on Online websites such as Amazon, Flipkart esp. during their festive season sales.
At Amazon I think this time, it was cash-back on HDFC & SBI cards, not sure about Fk.
Already have HDFC Regalia & Citibank Indian Oil in dad's & my name.

Looking for 2 credit cards for mom and wife, courtesy the demonitization drive.

HDFC's unpublished criteria is that you should have an income of 22L for last year. If you have that, you probably have an RM with HDFC, call him and he should be able to sort things out.

I have an income > 22L. However the salary account is not with HDFC. The bank account is normal savings bank account with min 10K balance requirement, No info / contact details of RM. Any idea as to how do I proceed?

I also spoke to the Banking helpline. The executive told me to fill up a form and forward to Chennai office along with payslips of last three months and copy of PAN card. Please note that the form is for Imperia and Preferred customers and not specifically for upgrade to Diners Black Card.

If you don't have an RM, meet the branch manager and ask him to handle the case or to put a senior person in his credit card department on your case.
Involving a responsible person from the branch is often essential for getting approved for this card.
Chennai people are known to easily reject forms (for such super premium cards) which do not have an approval/countersign from a branch representative.
The form can be found here.

If you have the Diners Black Card, may I ask if it is life time free? My Diners Premium Card (that I hold now) is life time free.

Diners Black never gets the annual fee waived off, nor does it have a lifetime free version.
I was in the same boat as you, had the Diners Premium life time free.

One more thing to note before you go in: They 'adjust' your rewards points balance to 40% of your original amount when you are approved for Black.
Their reasoning is that redemption rates for Black are much better than Premium.
However, by my calculations, reducing the points to 40% is outrageous even taking into account the redemption rate difference.
Hence, I'd strongly suggest you use up your current balance (in my case, I transferred them all to my frequent flyer program) before you apply for Black.

Good luck ! :)

Thanks for all the info. I think PM feature has not yet been activated for you. So asking here.
You are being charged normal fee (Initial and annual) mentioned in the application form?

Going through your old posts, I found that we have three things in common:
1. I also frequently check my CIBIL score to know where my current credit worthiness stand.
2. I have a CC purely for its liberal air-mile redemption programme (SBI Air India Visa Signature) and
3. Aviation (I am a serving IAF officer):)

Its very nice to see an IAF officer on this forum :) and if I may take the liberty, even rarer to find one with an active interest in Frequent Flyer programs.

I'd love to discuss all things Aviation, air-mile earning credit cards and CIBIL with you !

To answer your question, indeed I am being charged 5k as renewal fees and 10k as the first year fee. The first year fee got me 10k miles, which I happily put in my American Airlines account. (Those were back in the day when Diners list of Airline partners included a large number of airlines instead of the only 3 currently.)

I am not sure of the scene in India but in the US, frequent checks on a persons credit score is actually detrimental. Atleast that is what I was told when I stayed there about 15 years back. There were guides to getting (and maintaining) a good score and one tip was to not keep checking or applying for schemes that would require a credit check. Further in the US, if anyone had run a credit check against you, they were required to share a copy with the applicant and they could only run a check, if the applicant explicitly authorized it.

I am pretty sure some of the information you got is outdated, even for the US scene.
Typically, there are 2 kinds of enquiries as far as credit bureaus are concerned: Soft Pull and Hard Pull.

A soft pull happens when a customer checks his own credit score. It can also happen when a bank is checking the credit report of an existing customer (e.g. in case of increasing credit limit). More on this later.
Soft pull does not harm your credit score at all. Not even by a single point.

A hard pull is when you apply for new credit (credit card, loan, etc.) and the concerned financial institution pulls all your credit info and history. Hard pull does ding your score by 3-4 points usually, which should fall off the score within 3-4 months of regular activity. Hard pull is always visible on your credit report and states the name of Financial Institution, the nominal credit limit they made the enquiry for and the date.

A financial institute has the option to go in for soft pull or hard pull. Usually banks do not do a hard pull if the existing customer has a good relationship with them and is just interested in applying for another card/swapping to a different card/increasing credit limit a bit. A new credit application on the other hand, always always results in a hard pull.

Hope the above wasn't too confusing. :)