The last edition of our road trip stats (you can find it here) was a little different to normal as we were overseas for much of the month of August.
That meant we had to adjust how we calculated our budget for August 2021, but with us being back on our road trip for the entirety of September, things are back to normal.
At the beginning of September I’d been fairly confident that we’d be able to stay under budget over the course of the month as our accommodation spending wasn’t due to be too high. However, we did end up incurring some other expenses towards the end of the month which meant it wasn’t going to be a sure thing.
Did we manage to stay under budget in September? Read on to find out that and all our other stats for last month.
Miles Driven
We ended August with 162,107 miles on the clock. By the end of September our car’s odometer reading was 164,235 which means that we drove 2,128 miles in September. When writing last month’s stats, I predicted that we’d drive 1,800 miles in September and so I was a little off with that guess.
Looking ahead to how much we’ll be driving in October, I’m figuring our mileage for the month will be even higher than that. We’re currently in New Mexico and we’ll be heading to Oregon next week, so that’ll put a decent number of miles on our car. We’ve also driven to and from Santa Fe a couple of times recently and done a bit more driving than we usually do, so I’ll guess that we’ll hit about 2,700 miles in October.
Money Spent
Ever since we started our 50 state road trip on January 1, 2018, we’ve been working on a budget of $100 per day. That has to cover all our road trip expenses – accommodation, gas, food, activities, cell phone bills, etc. With 30 days in September, we therefore had a budget of $3,000 for the month.
By the end of last month we’d spent $2,888.54 which means we were under budget by $111.46. Any time we stay under budget it’s a good result, but it could have been even less.
Once again, our dog Truffles was the source of some of our spending which I hadn’t mentally accounted for at the start of the month. She was due a vet visit to get some shots, so we got that done as soon as we arrived in Albuquerque and that cost $262.03.
With us going to the International Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, we weren’t sure how long we’d be gone for the morning and evening sessions. We were apprehensive about leaving her at the hotel in case the sessions lasted longer than we expected or if we got stuck in traffic, so we figured the best thing to do would be to leave her with a pet sitter for a few days. That cost $90 which is another reason we didn’t stay as far under budget as I initially thought we might.
Here’s a breakdown of our spending from last month…
…along with a chart tracking our spending in 2021 so far. With us staying that far under budget in September, it put us back under budget for the year as well which was pleasing.
Looking ahead to our spending for October, I think we’re going to end up going over budget. Our accommodation expenditure will be average, but there’s one expense that’ll likely push us over – our hot air balloon flight. Including tip, that cost us $538 which is more than five days worth of our budget. It’s therefore unlikely with an expense that large that our spending will recover even if we’re careful in other areas. I’m not overly fussed by that as the balloon flight was definitely worth it.
Accommodation Cost
We stayed in six different hotels in September, so here’s a breakdown of how we paid for those.
September 1-4: Hyatt Place Denver Tech Center, CO (here’s my review). Four nights from this stay were at the end of August, so they appeared on our August stats. The final three nights were in September and cost $92.61 per night including tax. However, we paid for the stay with a card that had a Hyatt Amex Offer loaded to it. That gave 10% back as a statement credit, so our net cost was $83.35 per night.
September 4-10: Airbnb in Santa Fe, NM. That stay cost a total of $633.25 for the six nights, but we paid for it with Airbnb gift cards we’d bought at a 12.5% discount. That meant our net cost was $92.35 per night.
September 10-20: TownePlace Suites Farmington, NM (here’s my review). This TownePlace Suites is a category 2 property in the Marriott Bonvoy program and so cost 12,500 points per night as it was priced as standard (Marriott has off-peak, standard and peak pricing for award stays).
Marriott offers every 5th night free on award stays and we stayed 10 nights. That meant we got both our 5th and 10th nights free, so our total cost was 100,000 points or 10,000 points per night.
September 20-25: TownePlace Suites Gallup, NM (here’s a post about the ridiculousness we encountered there). Similar to the TownePlace Suites in Farmington, this is a category 2 property. However, they were charging a mix of standard and peak prices during our stay. We got to take advantage of the 5th night free benefit again, but having some peak dates mixed in meant it cost us an average of 11,500 points per night.
September 25-30: Hyatt Regency Albuquerque, NM (here’s my review). The Hyatt Regency Albuquerque is a category 1 property in the World of Hyatt program and so only costs 5,000 points per night.
Shae and I decided to splash out with this stay though. Hyatt lets you book both standard and premium suites with points if there’s availability. At a category 1 property, a premium suite only costs 10,000 points per night which is still a great price. With the Hyatt Regency Albuquerque, their premium suites are listed as ‘VIP Suite/Presidential Suite’. When checking in we asked if it would be possible to get the Presidential Suite and they gave it to us 🙂 It was therefore a lot of fun swanning around in a 1,556 sq ft suite for five nights – that’s twice as large as the apartment we used to rent!
September 30-October 1: Hyatt Place Albuquerque/Uptown, NM (review coming in several weeks time). For the International Balloon Fiesta itself, I booked us in at the Hyatt Place Albuquerque/Uptown as it was only a few minutes away from a shuttle bus stop taking you to Balloon Fiesta Park. Similar to the Hyatt Regency, it’s a category 1 property and so only costs 5,000 points per night.
Hotel Points Earned
On the face of it, it looks like we had a pretty good month for earning hotel points based on the figures below, but the numbers don’t tell the full story. For example, we “earned” a bunch of IHG points, but those were actually points that we bought for an upcoming stay as the cost of the points was a fair bit less than we’d have paid for the room if we’d booked it using cash.
Similarly, the increase in Hyatt points came about by transferring in Ultimate Rewards points from Chase. The Hilton points came mostly from credit card spend as we have a couple of cards that earn 6 points per dollar at grocery stores and I did a bit of manufactured spending on them.
Here’s a breakdown of what we earned in September:
- IHG Rewards – 121,557
- Hilton Honors – 49,686
- Marriott Bonvoy – 10,102
- World of Hyatt – 54,933
- Radisson Rewards – 0
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 4,048
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 13,716
- Capital One – 2,000
Hotel Points Redeemed
Although we “earned” a bunch of points last month, we also redeemed quite a few IHG and Hyatt points for upcoming stays in Oregon – here’s a breakdown of what we used:
- IHG Rewards – 180,000
- Hilton Honors – 0
- Marriott Bonvoy – 0
- World of Hyatt – 79,000
- Radisson Rewards – 0
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 10
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 40,000
- Capital One – 0
Total Hotel Points Balances
Based on those changes, here’s how our hotel points balances ended up at the end of September:
- IHG Rewards – 153,324
- Hilton Honors – 1,069,345
- Marriott Bonvoy – 616,324
- World of Hyatt – 65,785
- Radisson Rewards – 93,092
- Choice Privileges – 122,184
- Wyndham Rewards – 72,875
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 9
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 655,073
- Capital One – 168,192
Here’s all that information in table format:
Hotel Free Night Certificates
We had a couple of changes in the number of hotel free night certificates that we have. We received another IHG certificate from one of our credit cards renewing, while we redeemed a couple of Marriott certificates to book a stay for my parents next month.
- IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 4
- Hilton (any property worldwide) – 4
- Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 3
- Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 2
- Hyatt (category 1-4) – 2
- Hyatt (category 1-7) – 1
Jogging
I didn’t go jogging at all in September I’m afraid. I did do a reasonable amount of hiking though, including a 12 mile hike nearly all uphill – more about that one here.
Blog Stats
I’ve been trying to get caught up on blog posts this past month as I’m far behind on them and still have lots I want to cover. I managed to get 16 written in September, but I’m hoping to get even more done during October – we’ll have to see how that goes!
- Number of blog posts published – 16
- Page views – 21,451
Final Thoughts
September was a pretty good month for our stats. We stayed under budget and earned quite a few points, although we did redeem even more points than that. Hopefully October ends up being a fairly good month for our stats, other than the one-off large expense of our balloon flight.
I will be curious to read your review of the Hyatt Regency ABQ because they were closed for over a year during the pandemic. The HR used to be my go to hotel in ABQ. Now it is the Doubletree.
I’ll give you a sneak preview. They’re still ramping up – breakfast is only offered as room service and only from Wednesday to Sunday. For Monday and Tuesday, we were given gift cards to get breakfast at Sawmill Market which is 1.5 miles away which was a little weird.
I think this is a result of them being short-staffed, so the Starbucks is still closed as are the hotel’s other restaurants. However, all the staff working there were lovely and did their best to give good service, so we would be happy staying there again.