Road Trip Stats: Month 22 – October 2019

It’s the start of a new month which can only mean one thing – it’s time to share our stats from October 2019.

In case you’re not familiar with these posts, every month we publish a bunch of different stats relating to the previous month – our budget, miles driven, hotel points earned and redeemed and some details about our blog readership.

Last month’s budget wasn’t great as a couple of unexpected expenses pushed us ~$300 over budget for the month. Heading into October, I’d been hopeful that we’d be able to stay under budget last month and, if possible, stay $210 under budget as that would mean we’d be back under budget for the year.

How did we do? Keep reading to find out.

Miles Driven

Our Toyota Corolla started October with 124,706 miles showing on the odometer. By the end of the month it had exactly 127,000 miles on the clock, so we drove 2,294 miles during October.

I’d predicted we’d drive 1,900 miles, so I was several hundred miles off. I think this is partly because we ended up driving more in West Virginia than I’d been anticipating and also because Shae drove more while I was away for 40k To Far Away than I thought she might. For example, I’d forgotten that she’d been planning to drive up to Roanoke with her mom to get new tattoos, so that added some extra miles.

I’ve been pretty poor about predicting our mileage all year, but I’ll keep guesstimating for fun. I think our mileage during November will be even higher than last month as we’re still driving around West Virginia, then we’re heading to Washington D.C., then we’re visiting Hampton Roads, VA for Thanksgiving. I’ll therefore predict we’ll drive 2,550 miles this month – stay tuned to see how that works out.

Money Spent

We’re trying to do our 5 year, 50 state road trip on a budget of $100 per day which has to cover everything – accommodation, food, activities, gas, phone bill, hotel pet fees, etc. With 31 days in October, our budget last month was $3,100.

By the end of the month we’d spent $3,034.81 which means we were $65.19 under budget. That was pretty good, but it got even better. The hotel we stayed at in Bridgeport WV had a pet fee of $150 which was ridiculously high compared to most other hotels, especially seeing as that’s charged per stay. That means that even if you only stayed for one night with a dog, you’d still have to pay $150.

Well, when we checked out we noticed on our folio that they hadn’t charged the $150 pet fee, making our October budget even healthier than expected. That means our actual spending was only $2,884.81, so we were $215.19 under budget.

That made me happy for a couple of reasons. The first is simply because we were under budget. The second is that it made us $5.83 under budget for the entire year, so yay!

In case you’re interested in what we spent our money on, here’s a pie chart breaking that down. Our ‘household’ spending was so high as that included several hundred bucks for a visit to the dentist.

Here’s another chart showing our 2019 spending so far.

I don’t think we’ll still be under budget for the year by the end of November though. Our accommodation costs are due to be significantly higher than normal as we have far more paid stays scheduled for this month than award stays using our hotel points. I’m OK with that though as we’re due to earn a decent number of points from those paid stays which made it more worthwhile than redeeming points.

All I can hope is that we manage to find some good points options when booking our hotels for Tennessee in December. If we do, we might manage to stay under budget for the year overall, but we’ll see.

Points Earned

I was overseas for the first couple of weeks of October while Shae stayed with her parents. We subsequently stayed at an Airbnb and then a hotel using points, so we didn’t earn many points last month.

Having said that, our points balances did get a bit of a boost. We got 25,000 Marriott Bonvoy points from the Fairfield Inn & Suites Charlottesville North after getting bed bugs there in September. Most of the other points we earned came from spending on various different credit cards.

Here’s a breakdown of what we earned in October:

• IHG Rewards Club – 500
• Hilton Honors – 120
• Marriott Bonvoy – 25,000
• World of Hyatt – 3,159
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 3
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 10,187

Points Redeemed

We only redeemed 20,000 points last month. That was for Hyatt to pay for four nights at one of their category 1 properties later this month. We transferred 2,000 of our Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt for that redemption, which is why that shows as -2,000.

• IHG Rewards Club – 0
• Hilton Honors – 0
• Marriott Bonvoy – 0
• World of Hyatt – 20,000
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 2,000

Total Points Balances

Taking into account all those changes, our overall points balances ended up being a little higher by the time October ended.

• IHG Rewards Club – 455,090
• Hilton Honors – 707,994
• Marriott Bonvoy – 385,335
• World of Hyatt – 11,378
• Radisson Rewards – 314,750
• Choice Privileges – 26,226
• Wyndham Rewards – 46,600
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 18
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 279,906

I’m not entirely sure where our points balances will end up by the end of November. We’re due to earn quite a few points from hotel stays this month, but we’ll likely redeem quite a few for stays in December, so it might end up being a bit of a wash.

We’re currently working on the minimum spend for a couple of new hotel credit cards, but the bonus points from the signup bonuses are unlikely to post during November. When they do, we should end up boosting our points balances by about 300,000 points which will be helpful.

Here’s our points balances in table form for those of you that prefer having it presented this way 🙂

Blog Stats

We published fewer posts last month than normal seeing as I was away for a couple of weeks and didn’t have the time or energy to write anything.

Our page views also dropped, but I think that was due to a change I made to the site. I updated it from http to https which makes it more secure for you, but it means we had a temporary hit in how many visitors Google sent us – there was a notable drop in traffic almost as soon as I made that change. Google values sites with https higher than those with http, so this should help with our search engine rankings over the longer term. Our traffic has already recovered a little, so hopefully that continues in the coming days and weeks.

• Number of blog posts published – 18
• Page views – 27,511

Final Thoughts

I’m really pleased with our stats for October. We stayed under budget by more than $200 which also put us under budget for the year overall. We also earned more hotel points than we redeemed, so we’re in a pretty good position heading into the last two months of the year.

November will likely see us go over budget due to our hotel costs, so that’s not as great. By this time next month I should have our hotels booked through the end of the year, so I’ll have a better idea of what our December spending will look like at that stage.