If you pay your bill on time, credit cards actually offer a free, short-term loan. They also help keep track of your spending much more easily than cash and let you download your transaction history for free.

Credit card benefits or perks fall majorly into 4 categories.

1. Reward Points on Credit Cards:

Most of the credit cards give you reward points when you spend online or offline at stores. The reward points can be redeemed for a gift or a shopping voucher. For example, one can redeem Credit Card reward points for Amazon Shopping Vouchers or to buy an airline ticket.

2. Cash back to credit card statement:

Some credit cards offer cash back on a particular type of shopping and you can find new offers time to time to avail such cash back. For example, some credit cards offer 5% cash back on groceries purchase, that comes back into your credit card statement. Some cards offer 5% cash back on restaurant bills paid through the card.

A few months back, Citibank credit card offered Rs 10,000 cash back on purchase of Apple MacBook Air. If the actual cost of  MacBook is Rs 68,000 and after cash back the net cost will come down to only Rs 58,000.

3. Miles for air travel:

Some platinum credit cards offer access to exclusive airport lounges.

You can apply for an airline co-branded credit card to earn Air-miles and redeem for air tickets once you have sufficient air-miles in your account. For example, ICICI Saphiro credit card is co-branded with JetAirways. One earns JPMiles whenever one shops using the said credit card. You also earn JPMiles when you travel through JetAirways.

Even though Jet Airways suspended operations, you can still redeem your JPMiles earned in your credit card account. JetPrivilege was spun off from Jet Airways in 2013, and since then has been operating as a different company, JetPrivilege Private Limited.

This company is owned 50.1% by Etihad and 49.9% owned by Jet Airways. This company now is responsible for running the marketing program known as JetPrivilege and hence, acts as a custodian for all the JPMiles ever issued or redeemed. For the financial year ended March 2018, JetPrivilege Pvt. Ltd made an income of Rs 622 crores and a profit of Rs 177 crore. So, given the profits and the revenue, it is less likely that your JPMiles will be worthless.

There are still several ways to redeem your JPMiles.

• Redeem on Jet Airways’ partner airlines.
• Redeem on Jet Airways’ European flight network: Jet Airways still owns the aircraft that operate a majority of their flights to Europe, such as flights to London, Amsterdam and Paris.
• For the rest, the option to redeem their JPMiles for fuel, movies and gift cards will always remain open.

4. Discounts on Online Shopping:

You can find big discounts when you spend money on online shopping of grocery, movie, food and travel portals (like Amazon, BigBasket, BookMyShow, Zomato, MakeMyTrip, Uber), using your credit card.

Some offers are available for long-term, for example, 20% discount on Uber rides is available with Standard Chartered Credit Cards.

And some offers are for limited time. For example, Amazon keeps on giving 5 to 10% discount on credit cards during shopping festivals.

Some credit card also offer benefits such as free warranty extensions on your purchases.

Disclaimer:  Some of the above mentioned offers/perks may or may not be valid now. Please check with the service provider before making any decision.