Evolving Rewards, Part Two: What a CIBC Mile Is Actually Worth

Back in January 2024 I wrote about my own move from a no-annual-fee CIBC Cash Back card to the CIBC Caribbean Visa Classic, then still called the Silver Visa, after CIBC discontinued the Cash Back card in 2022. I gave the Visa Classic's travel rewards a 6 out of 10 and left it there. Reading that post again, I notice the one thing I never answered: what is a single mile actually worth? I graded the program without ever putting a number on it.

Now I finally have the number, because I started spending the balance.

Why the miles pile up

Until recently I had redeemed exactly once, years ago, toward a hotel in Germany. After that I let the balance grow without touching it, and I doubt I am unusual. The reason these balances get so large is built into how the program works.

You do not have to lift a finger to earn. Spend on the card and you collect a mile for every US dollar, which for us works out to a mile for every two Barbados dollars. Most of those miles come from ordinary local spending, the groceries, the gas, the monthly bills, not only the odd purchase priced in US dollars. CIBC enrolls you the moment there is an email on your account, so the miles stack up on their own, in the background, whether or not you have ever opened the rewards app.

The catch is that you cannot see any of it where you do your everyday banking. The balance does not appear in the regular CIBC app. It lives in a separate place, the My Rewards app or the My Rewards website, so unless you go looking, it is easy to forget the miles are there at all. Mine sat quietly for years.

The only real effort comes when you finally want to spend. You register on the My Rewards app or site, add a funding card, credit or debit, to cover anything the miles do not stretch to, and from then on you pay with the digital rewards card's number. It is a one-time chore. Your browser, phone, or password manager will save the card and fill it in at the next checkout, the same as any other card.

Which is how I finally began drawing the balance down. There were things I wanted anyway in the USD $100 range, and once the card was set up, paying with miles was easier than dipping into savings.

Two things had been nagging me the whole time. The miles expire, and I had never confirmed what they actually convert to. So this time I read the receipts and worked out the rate.

The two receipts

I paid for two everyday things using the My Rewards digital card.

Purchase	Price charged	Miles used	Miles per USD $1
A PlayStation Store game	USD $5.40	637	117.96
One month of LinkedIn Premium	USD $19.99	2,358	117.96

The LinkedIn invoice and the CIBC approval screen even carried the same transaction ID, so the dollar figure and the miles figure describe the same event.

That gives a clean answer for everyday retail spending:

On retail purchases, one CIBC mile is worth about 0.85 US cents, or 1.7 BBD cents.

That is the number to hold on to. It did not hold everywhere, though, and I found that out when I paid a bill with the same card.

What that means against what you earn

CIBC Caribbean states the earn rate plainly on the Visa Classic page and in the My Rewards FAQ: you receive one reward for every USD $1 (or local equivalent) spent, capped at 250,000 a year.

A word on what to call them, because CIBC does not keep it straight. The FAQ says points; the emails, the Miles Digital Card, and the cibccaribbeanmiles.com program all say miles. The Terms and Conditions give up and call them "Reward Points/Miles". I use miles, the word CIBC puts in front of you everywhere except the fine print.

So you earn one mile per dollar, and each mile redeems for about 0.85 US cents.

Multiply those together and the card returns about 0.85 percent of your spending. In Barbados dollars, that is one mile per BBD $2 spent, each worth 1.7 BBD cents, the same 0.85 percent.

The no-annual-fee Cash Back card this product replaced in 2022 paid a flat 1 percent. The rebrand to a miles program quietly moved the everyday return from 1 percent to 0.85 percent. The fees and the limits stayed the same, so on paper nothing changed. The value of what you take back out did.

Is the gap an exchange-rate trick?

My first suspicion, as a Barbadian used to paying a premium on foreign currency, was that the conversion hid a BBD-to-USD markup. It did not. Both redemptions converted at the bare two-to-one peg, within a fraction of a percent; a typical foreign-currency markup would have added a few percent, and none appeared. So the 0.85 percent is simply the value CIBC assigns to a mile. Why there was no markup, the next redemption made clear.

The rewards card pays in US dollars

Then I paid a bill in Barbados dollars, and the clean number moved.

I used the same digital rewards card to pay a local bill, BBD $99. It cost 6,046 miles. At the retail rate of 117.96 miles per US dollar, and the bare two-to-one peg, BBD $99 should have cost about 5,840 miles. It cost about 200 more, which works out to 122.1 miles per US dollar of value, or roughly 0.82 US cents a mile instead of 0.85. About 3.4 percent worse.

The reason is simpler than a hidden fee: the My Rewards digital card is a US-dollar card. When I tried to have Amazon bill it in Barbados dollars, it could not, because the card only reads as US dollars.

That explains both numbers. The US-priced purchases had nothing to convert, so they redeemed at the clean 117.96 miles per dollar. The local bill was priced in Barbados dollars, so it had to be converted to bill a US-dollar card, and that crossing carries a cost. The 3.4 percent I measured is that cost, and it applies to any Barbados-dollar redemption, not only bills. It is not the government's 2 percent foreign-exchange fee, which the Central Bank charges on buying or spending foreign currency and waives when you convert it back into local money; what I measured is the card's own conversion spread, which CIBC does not publish.

Spend the miles on things priced in US dollars and you get the full 0.85 percent. Point them at anything priced in Barbados dollars and you hand a few percent back at the currency border. CIBC's own emails nudge you the other way, inviting you to "pay at your favourite local brands", but a local brand means a Barbados-dollar charge, which is exactly where that few percent leaks out.

The number CIBC will not print

You will not find 0.85 US cents anywhere in CIBC's material. The My Rewards FAQ says the miles needed for any redemption are set by "the cost of the goods or service, any associated merchant or third party vendor fees and the value of points as determined by CIBC." The program is run by a third-party rewards platform, novae, which brands the service "Miles by novae" and runs the Voyage engine behind the travel redemptions. There is no published conversion rate, which is why the only way to learn it is to spend a little and measure, as I did.

The marketing leans the other way. The emails I get advertise "up to 40 percent off hotels" and "up to 35 percent off on Amazon," percentages off rather than a value per mile. Those percentages may hold up in the travel lane, and they may be calculated against inflated reference prices. I have not measured a hotel redemption yet, so I am not going to claim either way. What I can say is that the everyday cash-equivalent lane, the one most of us actually use, pays 0.85 percent.

The trap that actually costs you

The real risk with these miles is not the exchange rate. It is the clock.

CIBC My Rewards miles expire 36 months after the date you earn them, and unused miles are forfeited with no reinstatement. Close the account and you forfeit the lot. This is not hypothetical. Back in 2022 the bank emailed cardholders to say a batch of miles was about to expire, then granted a one-time extension to the end of 2023 after people complained they could not redeem in time during the pandemic. The clock has bitten before. The one mitigation sits in the same Terms: redemptions run first-in, first-out, so when you spend, the oldest miles go first and the batch nearest to expiry clears before anything newer.

It was ticking for me. A tranche of 2,860 miles, about USD $24 at 0.85 US cents a mile, was set to expire at the end of the year, the kind of slice that quietly vanishes when you forget about it. I did not forget. I spent it down ahead of the deadline, which is the whole point of measuring this in the first place. Only a few dozen miles will lapse now.

A single redemption with the digital rewards card is capped at 20,000 miles, about USD $170. You cannot cash out a large balance in one move. You draw it down in chunks of roughly $170, several redemptions to clear a few hundred dollars, while the clock keeps running. The bigger the pile, the longer it takes to spend before it expires. The Terms set one more ceiling above that, a maximum of 310,000 miles on non-travel redemptions, a wall most balances never reach but another nudge toward the travel side.

A year of a service like LinkedIn Premium, around USD $240, already sits past the cap, so even that cannot run entirely on miles. The miles cover about $170 of it and your own card pays the rest.

There is a second clock now, beyond the 36-month one. CIBC Caribbean is being acquired by Butterfield, and loyalty programmes are often reworked after a change of ownership. As I set out when the deal was announced, the two banks run incompatible schemes: My Rewards is a novae-run miles programme, while Butterfield's own cards in Bermuda and Cayman earn American Airlines AAdvantage miles, and conversions between two systems like that rarely work out in the cardholder's favour. Nothing has been announced about the future of My Rewards, so this is not a prediction. But between the takeover and the expiry clock, the case for not letting a balance sit only gets stronger.

The honest verdict

My whole accumulated balance, a little over 35,000 miles built up across years of spending, is worth about USD $300, or BBD $600. Years of routing purchases through the card distilled down to roughly one good dinner out. That is what 0.85 percent feels like in absolute terms, and it is the quiet cost of dressing a sub-one-percent rebate up as "miles."

I treat it as a 0.85 percent cashback card for US-priced spending, and less when the miles have to cross into Barbados dollars, so I point it at the PlayStation Store and Amazon and keep it off local charges. The travel lane might do better, and I will test it the day I am booking enough travel to bother. What I will not do is let a balance sit. Each mile only edges toward its 36-month expiry, and the takeover sharpens the point: I do not know what Butterfield will do with this programme, and I would rather spend these miles at a rate I can measure today than wait to see what they convert into. So I draw the balance down as I go.

If you carry one of these cards, two practical moves. First, find your own rate the way I did, by paying for one fixed-price item with the miles card and dividing the miles by the dollars. Second, redeem often enough that your balance turns over before any batch hits the 36-month mark, and check the expiry dates in the My Rewards app so you do not lose miles to the clock.