While the CIBC Aventura Visa Card for Business won’t be the go-to card for business owners sheerly due to restrictiveness of Aventura points, it’s always in the background when you’re looking to diversify your points portfolio.
Bonuses and Fees
When you apply for the CIBC Aventura Visa Card for Business, you get 25,000 Aventura points as a signup bonus after making your first purchase.
You can also earn an additional 35,000 Aventura points if you spend $35,000 in the first year, for a total of 60,000 Aventura points. However, this likely isn’t a realistic goal for most cardholders.
The $120 annual fee is currently not waived for the first year. You can add $60 to the annual fee if you need low-interest financing for your business cashflow.
Is the bonus on this card a world-beater? No. But if you’ve already signed up for the better offers out there, then the CIBC Aventura for Business can be a neat and tidy card to keep the bonuses flowing.
Earning Rewards
This is a card that you want to get for its signup bonuses, rather than for its return on everyday spending. That’s because Aventura points are hardly the most useful points you can earn, and there are much more desirable rewards currencies you should aim to earn instead.
But for what it’s worth, you’ll get 2 Aventura points per dollar spent on travel booked via the CIBC Travel Rewards Centre, 1.5 Aventura points per dollar spent on gas purchases, as well as travel purchases outside of booking directly with CIBC, and 1 Aventura point per dollar spent on all other purchases.
Because welcome bonuses are significantly stronger than daily spending on this card, it’s probably a better choice for business owners who prefer to keep all of their business expenses on one card. The $65,000 minimum spend requirement is certainly more achievable if it aligns with your pragmatic accounting goals.
Redeeming Rewards
Using the Aventura Airline Rewards Chart, with a signup bonus of 25,000 Aventura points, you can redeem that towards an $800 airline ticket in the “Canada and U.S. (long-haul)” category. The full bonus of 60,000 Aventura points would be enough to fly to sun destinations on a $1,000 ticket.

It’s not really worth redeeming Aventura points for anything but airline travel, since the redemption rate is quite poor. The good news is that CIBC often puts on promotions allowing you to redeem certain routes for a discounted number of points, so even if you don’t have immediate travel plans, the Aventura points are useful to keep around.
Most of the times these days I book award tickets for my travels, but everybody runs into situations where they need to pay cash for a ticket, and having Aventura points lying around to offset the cost is quite useful indeed.
(Oh and, it’s my understanding that while CIBC Rewards says you must redeem for round-trip tickets, you can also use Aventura points for open-jaw tickets. That might make them useful for positioning flights at the start and end of long award trips.)
Perks & Benefits
The CIBC Aventura Visa Card for Business has no perks or benefits to speak of.
Insurance Coverage
The insurance on the CIBC Aventura Visa Card for Business is quite competitive, though it lacks the emergency out-of-province medical insurance that makes the high-end cards (like the Amex Platinum Card) so outstanding.
With the Aventura for Business, you’ll get flight and baggage delay insurance, car rental loss and damage insurance (which can help you save on the daily insurance charged by car rental companies), $500,000 common carrier accident insurance, and protection against trip cancellation or interruption.