With travel slowly making a return and more Canadians looking to get away for this winter after being at home for the better of two years it’s nice to see a promotion like this come out. Earlier in the month CIBC launched a discounted reward offer for their Aventura cardholders that sees the points requirement for travel to sun destinations (outside of lower continental U.S.) reduced by 15%.
This means cardholders will be able to redeem between 34,000 and 51,000 points instead of 40,000 to 60,000 points for flights to Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska (I know, not a sun destination) Bermuda, Central America or Caribbean. This offer is good for Aventura point redemption bookings made by October 27 and there is no actual set end date for travel which means you can book pretty much a year out since most airlines schedules are bookable between 330 and 365 days ahead of time.
The discount only works on Aventura Airline Chart redemptions, which as you see above for this category will cover ticket prices up to $1,000 before taxes and fees. You must redeem for round trip flights and no promo code or anything like that is required – the discount is automatically applied. The redemption amount will depend on the ticket price with 34,000 points likely being available for tickets that have a base fare well below $500 and 51,000 points being required for the higher fares up to $1,000. Cardholders must then pay the taxes and fees associated with the redemption or choose to redeem points against them at a rate of 100 points to $1.
If you are maximizer of value you’ll of course want to get a ticket price as close to that $1,000 level so that you are effectively redeeming at 1.96 cents per points. Given that cards like the CIBC Aventura® Visa Infinite* Card and the CIBC Aventura® Gold Visa* Card earn up to 1.5 points per dollar spent on most everyday spending you would be looking at a return as high as 2.94%. If you earned some of those points by booking travel through CIBC Rewards those points would be earning a 3.92% return. If you’re not a maximizer who is just wanting to use your points to get out of dodge during the winter and want to save some cash well now’s the time to book since you’ll actually save some points for future travel or be able to use them to pay down some of the taxes and fees!
Click here to learn more about the Aventura redemption offer
Images via CIBC