Road Trip Stats: Month 47 – November 2021

Heading into November, I wasn’t sure how well we’d do on our budget over the course of the month.

Our accommodation spending was due to be average, but we’d be staying in Portland, OR for a couple of weeks which we anticipated would be a bit more of an expensive place than other places we’ve stayed recently.

We were on course to be under budget, but a rush of spending towards the end of the month made it a more close-run thing. How close? Read on to find out.

Miles Driven

We started November 2021 with 167,219 miles on the clock. By the end of the month our car’s odometer reading was 168,046 which means we drove 827 miles last month. I’d predicted in October’s stats post that we wouldn’t drive much more than 1,000 miles and that it was more likely that we’d be closer to 750 miles which ended up being true.

We’re going to be doing far more driving than that in December, so I’m going to predict that we’ll put 2,450 miles on the car this coming month.

Money Spent

With our daily budget for the road trip being $100, we had $3,000 to play with in November. It was going well as we were still more than $400 under budget with four days left. We ended up spending a fair bit during those four days and so we finished the month having spent $2,918.18 – $81.82 under budget.

That’s not quite as far under budget as I was initially hoping for, but it’s always satisfying any time that we don’t overspend and it means we’re still ~$170 under budget for the year as a whole.

One of our biggest expenses was eating out as that was just over $500 during November. Portland and Bend have had some good breweries, wineries and restaurants, so that’s why that portion of our spending was at its highest since January.

We also had a few other one-off expenses – AAA membership, a second hand bike for Shae along with a cycle helmet, lock, lights, etc., Other than that though, our spending seemed to be fairly standard which is reflected by the fact that we spent close to our budget of $3,000.

Here’s a breakdown of our spending for November 2021…

…along with a chart tracking our spending for the year.

Looking ahead to our spending for December 2021, I’m fairly sure we’ll be going over budget. We’re due to have higher-than-average accommodation spending, we’ll be driving more and so spending more on gas and we’ll be in California for almost half the month where everything is more expensive. That means that we’ll likely also end up over budget for the year as a whole, but not by too much.

Accommodation Cost

Shae and I stayed at three different places in November – two hotels and one Airbnb.

November 1-12: Holiday Inn Express Bend, OR (here’s my review). We booked this using points and cost 20,000 points per night. Every fourth night was free thanks to having the IHG Premier credit card and we also got a 10% points rebate from having the IHG Select credit card. That meant we had a net cost of 13,500 points per night for the nights we booked in four night increments and 18,000 points per night for our final couple of nights (as we still got the 10% points rebate).

November 12-15: The Duniway Portland, OR (here’s my review). The first couple of nights cost $242.44 per night with tax and the third night was $219.24 with tax. That’s far more than we’d normally pay for hotels but the reason we stayed there is because it only cost us a fraction of that.

We have three personal Amex Platinum cards between us and they added a new benefit this year – $200 to spend on 1+ nights at Fine Hotels + Resorts (FHR) properties or 2+ nights at The Hotel Collection properties. The Duniway Portland is an FHR property (as well as being a Hilton brand) and so the first two nights had a net cost of $42.44 per night and the third night only cost us $19.24.

November 15-30: Airbnb in Portland, OR. We booked a 31 night stay which meant there weren’t any taxes payable on the stay. That limited the cost to $69.45 per night, but it got cheaper than that because we paid with Airbnb gift cards we bought at a discount. That reduced our cost to $62.73 per night.

Hotel Points Earned

November was a good month for increasing our hotel points balances. Our IHG balances increased thanks to some points rebates crediting and Shae earning 25,000 points by achieving Spire Elite status.

Our Hilton balances increased mainly due to points earned from the stay at the Duniway Portland, while our Marriott points increased mostly due to earning 10 points per dollar on PayPal spending when using my Marriott Amex card.

Our Wyndham Rewards balance got a big boost which was mainly due to a cancelled stay, while I put a lot of spend on my Chase Ink Plus card at office supply stores in order to earn at least 50,000 of the 76,169 Ultimate Rewards we earned in November.

Here’s a breakdown of everything we earned:

• IHG Rewards – 56,530
• Hilton Honors – 36,244
• Marriott Bonvoy – 27,371
• World of Hyatt – 19,678
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 55,611
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 76,169
• Capital One – 12,950

Hotel Points Redeemed

We only made one redemption of our points in November and it was a small one – just 18,000 points for an upcoming stay at a Holiday Inn.

• IHG Rewards – 18,000
• Hilton Honors – 0
• Marriott Bonvoy – 0
• World of Hyatt – 0
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0
• Capital One – 0

Total Hotel Points Balances

Based on those changes above, here’s how our hotel points balances looked at the end of last month:

• IHG Rewards – 1,057,537
• Hilton Honors – 1,137,168
• Marriott Bonvoy – 656,380
• World of Hyatt – 173,982
• Radisson Rewards – 93,092
• Choice Privileges – 99,744
• Wyndham Rewards – 137,610
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 10
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 843,490
• Capital One – 185,232

Here’s a table listing all that information:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

We earned and redeemed a few different hotel free night certificates in November 2021, so here’s what we currently have available to us:

• IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 4
• Hilton (any property worldwide) – 3
• Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 3
• Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 0
• Hyatt (category 1-4) – 4
• Hyatt (category 1-7) – 0

Jogging

I’ve let this lapse for now, so I’ll probably leave this off upcoming stats posts unless I suddenly start getting motivated to start jogging again.

Blog Stats

Here are a couple of stats relating to our blog from last month for anyone interested:

• Number of blog posts published – 10
• Page views – 16,529

Final Thoughts

November was a pretty good month on the stats front with us managing to stay under budget while also increasing our hotel points balances by more than 250,000 points. I’d love it if we could stay under budget in December and the year as a whole, but that’s unlikely.