Road Trip Stats: Month 49 – January 2022

January 2022 was due to be the start of our final year of what was meant to be a 5 year, 50 state road trip.

It’s taking us much longer than expected to tour the US though, so we decided last year to extend the trip to 8 years. That means what was meant to be the start of the final year was merely the start of the second half of our road trip!

January 2022 was also the start of our increased budget. For the first four years of our road trip we had a budget of $100 per day, while from last month we increased that to $125 per day.

Here are stats from the first month of this year where we share how we did with our budget, how many miles we drove, how many hotel points we earned and redeemed and more.

Miles Driven

We ended 2021 with 170,461 miles on our 2004 Toyota Corolla. By the end of January its odometer reading was 171,110 which means we drove 649 miles last month.

I’d predicted we’d drive 850 miles, so we were a fair amount below that. In theory we should’ve been closer to 850, but we didn’t end up doing much while staying in the Irvine, CA area.

We’ll be doing much more driving than that in February seeing as we’re driving around California quite a bit. I’ll therefore predict that we’ll drive 1,500 miles in February.

Money Spent

With an increased budget of $125 per day, we had a total budget of $3,875 in January. Despite having that increased spending ability, we went into the month not very confident that we’d manage to stay under budget due to how much we’d be spending on accommodation.

The result was better than I expected. We spent $3,914.44 which means we went $39.44 over budget. I thought we were going to be closer to $250+ over budget, so overspending by less than $40 was a great result.

Our biggest expenditure was hotels which cost just over $2,000 and was a higher amount than we normally spend on accommodation. Our actual hotel spending wasn’t particularly high as such because about half the month was paid for using points and free night certificates. What killed us was how much we had to pay for parking at some of those hotels. The Hyatt House we stayed at in Irvine charged $20 per night and The Westin and Hotel Indigo hotels we stayed at in downtown San Diego both charged $50 per night.

Our other two big spending categories were eating out and eating in – combined those came to almost $1,000 which was more than normal.

Here’s a breakdown of our spending from last month:

Looking ahead to our budget for February, I’m mildly optimistic that we’ll be able to stay under budget. However, we’re due to be in San Francisco towards the end of the month and haven’t quite decided on how to book that yet. If we book a paid stay that has a pet fee and expensive parking, that could affect our ability to stay under budget.

Accommodation Cost

We stayed in four different hotels in January 2022 – here’s how we paid for them:

January 1-3: The Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter, CA (here’s my review). We booked those two nights using free night certificates, so in theory the stay was free. However, we did have to pay $50 per night for parking and a $28.19 per night destination fee. Those free night certificates also came from renewing two Marriott credit cards, so in reality those cost us ~$200 total (I’m not sure which of our Marriott cards the certificates came from, but they all have annual fees close to $100).

January 3-7: Hotel Indigo San Diego Gaslamp Quarter, CA (here’s my review). We booked this stay using IHG Rewards points and should’ve cost 23,000 points per night which would’ve been good value as it was.

We did even better than that though. I utilized their 4th night free benefit on award stays from having an IHG Premier credit card, plus we’ll get a 10% points rebate from having the old IHG Select credit card. That reduced the cost from 23,000 points per night to 15,525 points per night. On top of that, we had to pay $50 per night for parking.

January 7-17: Homewood Suites Carlsbad-North San Diego County, CA (review to come in the next few days). This stay was booked using Hilton Honors points. The first 7 nights cost 37,000 points per night, while the last three nights cost 46,000 points per night.

Hilton gives every 5th night free if you have any kind of status which can even be obtained by having their credit card with no annual fee as that gives Silver status. As a result, our net cost was 31,400 points per night.

January 17-31: Hyatt House Irvine/John Wayne Airport. This hotel has a standard award cost of 8,000 points per night which would ordinarily be good value for the area.

However, I found a low paid rate which got lowered even further by submitting a Best Rate Guarantee (BRG) claim. You can read more about how Hyatt’s BRG policy works here, but as a quick summary – if you find a lower rate within 24 hours of your booking, Hyatt will match it and you can then choose an additional 20% discount or 5,000 bonus points. With us staying for so long, I chose the additional 20% discount.

That BRG claim therefore reduced our cost to $86.34 per night. We then reduced that cost even further to $75.63 per night by paying with Hyatt gift cards we’d bought at a discount. Unfortunately the hotel also charged $20 per night for parking.

Hotel Points Earned

January 2022 wasn’t a great month for us collecting lots of points. The bright side was Hilton Honors as we earned more than 180,000 points, 150,000 of which was from a credit card signup bonus.

It’ll look like we earned tons of Hyatt points below too, but those were transferred in from our Chase Ultimate Rewards accounts and so they weren’t newly earned.

Here’s a breakdown of all the points we earned last month:

• IHG Rewards – 11,806
• Hilton Honors – 182,258
• Marriott Bonvoy – 5,656
• World of Hyatt – 97,753
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 1,000
• Wyndham Rewards – 229
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 1,897
• Capital One – 0

Hotel Points Redeemed

I booked a number of upcoming award stays in January, so we redeemed far more points last month than we normally do. Marriott is due to devalue their points in the next month or two, so I wanted to redeem some points now at better value than we’ll likely get later.

Here’s a breakdown of all the points we redeemed last month:

• IHG Rewards – 144,000
• Hilton Honors – 0
• Marriott Bonvoy – 372,500
• World of Hyatt – 139,000
• Radisson Rewards – 90,000
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 95,000
• Capital One – 1,000

Total Hotel Points Balances

As a result of all that earning and redeeming activity, here’s how our total hotel points balances looked at the end of January 2022. Not as healthy at the start of the month, but still a ton of points to play with.

• IHG Rewards – 890,870
• Hilton Honors – 1,020,330
• Marriott Bonvoy – 303,383
• World of Hyatt – 73,456
• Radisson Rewards – 3,092
• Choice Privileges – 100,744
• Wyndham Rewards – 102,236
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 10
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 752,514
• Capital One – 184,232

Here’s all that information in table format:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

In addition to all our points, we have a number of free night certificates for certain hotel chains, most of which are received when renewing our credit cards each year, but others are earned from credit card spend or staying a certain number of nights per year.

Here’s how many free night certificates Shae and I had between us at the end of January.

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

Blog Stats

We published one fewer post in January than we had in December, but had about a 10% increase in page views which was good to see.

• Number of blog posts published – 9
• Page views – 16,384

RAGBRAI Update

My RAGBRAI training continues. I completed my training rides as scheduled the first two weeks including some great cross-training like sea kayaking and goat yoga. Then received my COVID Booster and travelled twice in 8 days the last two weeks. This resulted in two weeks of little to no training rides or cross-training. February is looking much better so I can’t wait to catch you up on it next month.

Final Thoughts

January 2022 was a fairly solid month stats-wise. We stayed very close to our budget and increased our page views. We redeemed more hotel points than we earned, but we still have a very healthy balance of points.