[UAE] Best Credit Card to Earn Etihad Guest Miles

A few days ago, I had written about the top credit cards in UAE to earn Emirates Skywards Miles. Like Emirates, Etihad Guest program is also linked to several credit cards, some of which are providing great sign-up bonuses.

Etihad Guest has number partners, some of which provide better value for your miles than Etihad itself! For more details, please read my previous post on Etihad Redemption – The Ultimate Guide.

Etihad Guest is a very useful program even for residents of Dubai even if you do not want to fly from Abu Dhabi airport. You can easily redeem your Etihad miles to travel to several cities from Dubai including Muscat (Oman Air), Mumbai / Delhi (Jet Airways), Colombo (Sri Lankan) etc.

Let us look at the best credit cards to help you earn more Etihad Guest Miles. The nominees are

1. ADCB Etihad Guest Infinite Card
2. FAB (formerly NBAD) Etihad Guest Infinite Card
3. ADIB Etihad Guest Platinum Card
4. American Express Platinum Credit Card
5. Citi Prestige Card
6. ADCB Travelers Credit Card

There are several other cards in the market that could earn Etihad miles. However, I believe others do not have returns even close the these six cards. Let us look at them in more detail.

ADCB Etihad Guest Infinite Card

This card comes with a sign-up bonus of 50,000 miles and a renewal bonus of 25.000 miles. The annual fees is AED 2,500 ($680) which means you are effectively buying Etihad miles at 1.4 cents a mile.

In 2017 and 2018, ADCB had a promotion offering 150,000 miles to non-citizens of UAE! This was, as you would expect, linked to spending – 50,000 miles on spending $10,000 in 3 months and another 50,000 miles on spending $30,000 in 3 months. The promotion is not running in 2019 yet.

Additionally, you would earn 1.5 miles per USD for retail spends, 2.25 miles for spends at hotel or duty-free and 3 miles for spends on Etihad.

Unlike most of the Skywards cards, Etihad cards are well-entrenched into the Etihad ecosystem. For example ADCB card also offers

• Tier miles on your spending
• Etihad Gold Membership upon taking a return flight on Etihad within 6 months
• A voucher that entitles you to get 50% off on any redemption any class in Etihad. You would have to jump through hoops to get this, but it would be incredibly useful for Etihad First redemption
• 4 complimentary transfers from anywhere in UAE to Abu Dhabi airport

FAB Etihad Guest Infinite Card

This is the Etihad card in my wallet, so kindly excuse my bias towards it. I had acquired this card last year during a promotional offer. I was offered no-fee for the first year, 115,000 miles as sign-up offer (no minimum spend) and double miles on utility spends for 3 months. There was a catch though, I could not cancel the card without paying annual fee for the second year – AED 2,500. I was fine with this as I was still getting Etihad miles at an incredible rate of 0.6 cents! I can easily get a value of 2 cents / mile, so it was a no-brainer.

Of course, there were several other benefits

• Tier miles on spending
• Etihad Gold Membership upon taking a return flight on Etihad within 6 months
• A voucher that entitles you to get 75% off on any redemption any class in Etihad. However, you would have to achieve an annual spend of AED 200,000 for this.
• 8 complimentary transfers to / from Abu Dhabi airport (4 transfers if you are travelling from / to Dubai city)
• 4 free Etihad wifi vouchers

Unfortunately, this promotion isn’t there now. Still, FAB if offering you 55,000 miles as sign-on, which is a fair deal.

The usual earnings rate aren’t too shabby either. You earn 4.5 miles per AED 10 on domestic transactions, 6 miles on international transactions and 9 miles on Etihad. For comparison purposes, in per USD terms it is 1.65 miles, 2.2 miles and 3.3 miles respectively.

ADIB Etihad Guest Platinum Card

While FAB and ADCB offer Visa Infinite version, ADIB continues to offer Visa Platinum as its flagship Etihad card. This means that some of the Visa Infinite linked benefits like movie discounts, lounge access may not be applicable here.

However, the earning rate is the highest for any Etihad-linked card. You can earn 5.5 miles per AED 10 on domestic transactions, 7.5 miles on international transactions. Additionally, ADIB offers a free companion ticket on Etihad (any destination, any class) upon achieving annual spend of AED 150,000. This can be of incredible value!

The card comes with an annual fee of AED 2,000 ($540) and offers a sign-up bonus of 50,000 miles. You could earn additional 70,000 miles on spending AED 50,000 in 3 months and further 80,000 miles on spending 100,000 in 6 months. However, the promotion ends on February 28, 2019.

American Express Platinum Card

You can read about the card here. Compared to other Etihad credit cards, this offers lower earning rate.

Citi Prestige

Etihad Guest is one of the redemption partners for Citi ThankYou points at 1:1 ratio.

For every dollar spent, you can earn 3 ThankYou points (international) or 2 ThankYou points (domestic retail). This makes the domestic spends’ earnings rate at par with ADIB Etihad Guest Platinum Card.

Citi Prestige card has an annual fee of AED 1,500 ($400). There was a promotion period (at least till end of 2018 and not Oct-18 as mentioned on their website) that gave 30,000 ThankYou points on sign-up and AED 1,250 statement credit linked to a threshold spend.

You can use my referral link to apply for the credit card.

There are no Etihad-specific benefits here. However, you will have a great deal of flexibility in choosing your redemption partner. With the exception of Emirates (because Citi and Emirates offer a co-branded card), you have nearly all major non-US airlines as partners including Turkish, Qatar, Singapore, Thai, British Airways and Malaysian!

ADCB Traveler’s Credit Card

This is another card in my portfolio.

ADCB Traveler’s card earns TouchPoints which can be redeemed on multiple partners including Etihad. The conversion ratio is 15:1.

ADCB hands out TouchPoints very generously. While the regular earnings rate is 2 TouchPoints per AED, it has frequent promotional offers. In the last 3 months, I have earned an average of 4 TouchPoints per AED using various promotional offers. This implies an earning rate of 1 Etihad mile per USD.

This doesn’t sound great does it? Why is this card in my wallet? There are two reasons

• The card offers 20% discount on any hotel booking done through hotels.com (base fare) and any airline booking done through cleartrip.ae (base fare). This has saved me at least AED 3,000 in the last 10 months.
• I only convert my TouchPoints to Etihad miles during promotional offers. In October 2018, ADCB offered 3x Etihad miles on conversion, significantly boosting the value of my TouchPoints.

The annual fee is AED 1.500 but you can a hotels.com voucher worth AED 1,000 (no minimum spend).

Conclusion

On an absolute basis, I value Etihad Guest Miles lower than Skywards Miles. This is also reflected in the co-branded credit cards. Etihad partner cards clearly offer a better earning rate and other benefits like Gold membership, tier miles, discount vouchers etc.

If you live in Abu Dhabi, having one of these cards is a must. If you are in any other Emirate, choice between Etihad cards and Emirates card will depend on your travel and spending pattern. For instance, I travel a lot to Mumbai and Delhi, and Jet Airways lets me redeem Etihad miles fairly attractively.

Or perhaps, you can choose an agnostic card like Citi Prestige or American Express Platinum. What do you think?