Recently, I visited US and found that my friend had applied for a credit card and got "Priority Pass" select access to lounges across many airports in the world. He is my peer and working with my same experience, but in US.
I tried to check if there is any such card which I can acquire and found that Citibank had a card called "Prestige card". When I enquired about it, they said I am not eligible as I am having a salary less than Rs. 25 lakhs. I was surprised because they said they cannot give me the card despite me being ready to pay an annual fee of Rs 20 K. As per them, the only rule that is visible to their eye is that I should earn more than 25 lakhs. What they never understand is that they are doing business in India and that the Indian employment market is very different in Emoluments than the US. If I were to shift on a US working visa today, I will be easily eligible for such a credit card in the US. But because I am in India, my salary is low and most executives who travel a lot are grossly underpaid.
Without even doing any such study or giving any thought, they simply refused to entertain my case further. Usually we see this kind of attitude in the Government. But I say that Govt officials are better off as they can take discretionary decisions. This technology led new age private companies are just rule driven and their top executives who are fatly paid are no better than glorified clerks who do some repetitive task.
Any Organization can be said to be as "intelligent" only when it has ears to listen and an agile mechanism to respond to the customer’s demands. Camera industry suffered because they failed to see Mobile as a challenge and Nokia almost died because it failed to recognize the upcoming smart phone technology. But lessons are hardly learnt. These companies ignore valuable customer feedback on side and conduct brainstorming sessions for their top executives to come up with ideas to generate more revenue!
Never apply for a credit card with Citibank. Thoughtless people who are literally unwilling to help and are unintelligent too. Otherwise who can ignore such a large IT population in India which has a salary between 10 - 25 lakh who can be easily targeted for such a credit card. Leave alone the question of whether these people will go in for the card paying such a huge fee, they are not ready even to customers who ask for it on a case to case basis. And believe me, my pay is just a minuscule away from their limit of 25 lakh.
And you know day by day the working hours of the banks are shrinking and soon we can expect 5 day working week for the bankers. God save this country.