2023 hasn’t been great on our budget. Inflation over the last couple of years has played a fairly big part in that, but we’ve also found ourselves spending more on accommodation overall, as well as an outsized amount on eating (and drinking!) out.
Heading into August I wasn’t overly confident about our ability to stay under budget for the month. I hadn’t thought that our accommodation spending was due to be excessively high, but we ended up spending more on that than I’d initially accounted for. Also, being in the Finger Lakes region meant we’d want to try out a bunch of different wineries.
Unfortunately this meant we did end up going over budget – read on to find out how much by.
Miles Driven
We started August with our car’s odometer reading at 202,232 miles. By the end of the month it was at 204,337 miles which means we drove 2,105 miles last month. I’d predicted in last month’s road trip stats post that we’d drive 2,200 miles, so I was pretty close with that guesstimate.
You might notice that the odometer reading in the photo above doesn’t show it at 204,337. That’s because I forgot to take a photo of the reading before driving somewhere on September 1, so I’ve deducted the 78 miles I drove that day to get August’s total.
Looking ahead to our mileage for this month, it’s hard to know what we’ll end up at. We’re in New England for the next couple of months and so the states are all fairly close together. However, we have quite a few activities planned that we’ll be driving to, so I’m going to predict we’ll drive 1,850 miles. That could end up being a wild overestimate or a wild underestimate, so I guess we’ll have to wait a month to see how accurate (or not!) that is.
Money Spent
Our daily budget for the road trip is $125 which has to cover everything – accommodation, groceries, eating out, gas, activities, parking, etc. August has 31 days in it, so our budget for the entire month was $3,875. By the end of the month we’d spent $4,586.91 which means we overspent by $711.91 – ouch!
Our accommodation spending was higher than I’d anticipated as that came to just over $2,150. Part of that is because we bought IHG and Choice points a month or two ago and are accounting for that by spreading the cost over the year, plus we spent almost three weeks of August in Airbnbs rather than booking a lot of stays using points. Our pet care expenses were higher than normal as Truffles had to have some routine vaccinations, plus we spent ~$1,000 on food and drink (that’s both groceries and eating/drinking out together).
Here’s a breakdown of our spending for August…
…along with a chart tracking our spending across 2023 as a whole.
Looking ahead to our September spend, I’m mildly confident we’ll stay within budget. Our accommodation spending won’t be crazy high, but unfortunately pet fees are set to be a total of $500 which is far higher than normal. If we get lucky, we won’t get charged for a couple of pet fees, but I’m not counting on that.
Accommodation Cost
We stayed in five different places in August – here’s a breakdown of how we booked those:
August 1-4: Hyatt Regency Rochester, NY (see my review here). This is a category 1 property in the World of Hyatt program and was at standard pricing throughout our stay, so it cost 5,000 Hyatt points per night.
August 4-18: Airbnb in Lodi, NY (this one). This was a great place to stay for a couple of weeks in the Finger Lakes. It cost $90.62 per night which was very reasonable, but we spent less than that as we paid for the stay with Airbnb gift cards we bought at a discount, so our net cost was $84.60 per night.
August 12-14: Beekman Hotel in New York City, NY (read my review of it over on Frequent Miler). While staying in Lodi, we had a quick getaway into NYC as a couple of sets of friends were both visiting there that weekend and stayed at the Beekman Hotel in Lower Manhattan. This is a Thompson hotel which is part of the World of Hyatt program and we booked with points. Hyatt has off-peak, standard and peak pricing depending on demand; our first night cost 25,000 points and the second was 21,000 points.
August 18-28: Residence Inn Manchester Downtown, NH (see my review here). We booked this using Marriott Bonvoy points and it cost 16,000 points per night. Marriott has a 5th night free benefit on award stays, so seeing as we were staying a total of 10 nights, we got two nights free. That reduced our total cost to 128,000 points, or 12,800 points per night.
August 28-September 1: Airbnb in Troy, NY (this one). The way our plans worked out meant we had a spare week between visiting New Hampshire and the start of when we planned to visit Massachusetts. We therefore decided to head back in to New York state to stay in the Albany area.
This two bedroom Airbnb cost $115.91 per night, but we reduced our cost to $98.52 per night by paying with discounted Airbnb gift cards.
Hotel Points Earned
We had some seemingly large increases in our points balances this month, but most of those are just from points being moved around. Most of the Hyatt increase was from either cancelled award stays or transfers from Chase Ultimate Rewards, while most of the Wyndham increase was from transfers from Capital One.
Here’s a breakdown of everything we earned in August:
- IHG One Rewards – 9,800
- Hilton Honors – 67,038
- Marriott Bonvoy – 2,500
- World of Hyatt – 198,353
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 134,897
- Hotels.com OneKey – $0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 22,268
- Capital One – 0
Hotel Points Redeemed
Last month I started booking quite a few stays for next year for Alaska, our 20th anniversary and more. That meant we had some quite large redemptions:
- IHG One Rewards – 18,000
- Hilton Honors – 480,000
- Marriott Bonvoy – 88,000
- World of Hyatt – 264,000
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 94,500
- Hotels.com OneKey – $0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 150,000
- Capital One – 104,864
Total Hotel Points Balances
Based on all these changes, here are our points totals at the end of August:
- IHG One Rewards – 607,936
- Hilton Honors – 150,548
- Marriott Bonvoy – 89,127
- World of Hyatt – 120,737
- Choice Privileges – 225,351
- Wyndham Rewards – 66,526
- Hotels.com OneKey – $19.26
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 278,885
- Capital One – 208,323
Here’s all that information in table format:
Hotel Free Night Certificates
Last month we redeemed one of our IHG certificates that was just about to expire, earned a new Hilton free night certificate thanks to spending $15,000 on one of our Hilton Surpass cards and also earned a new Hyatt cert by hitting 30 nights stayed with Hyatt this year so far.
- IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 2
- Hilton (any property worldwide) – 1
- Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 3
- Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 0
- Hyatt (category 1-4) – 3
- Hyatt (category 1-7) – 0
Blog Stats
Shae and I managed to knock out more posts than usual in August, so we managed to catch up on some of our backlog – hopefully we can continue that over the next couple of weeks before my parents come to visit from the UK as we’ll be much busier then.
- Number of blog posts published – 17
- Page views – 29,210
Final Thoughts
August 2023 wasn’t a great month for our stats. We went over budget by far more than we’d expected, plus our hotel balances dropped quite a bit due to booking quite a few award stays for next year. Hopefully we can do better with everything over the next few months to finish the year in a stronger position.
Looks like you booked 5 Nights at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island. Will you try out another Resort in the Maldives while you are there too?
You can tell a lot just by the point total redemptions…looks like a 7 night stay at a Vacasa Vacation Rental using Wyndham. The things you notice from being in the game!!
I think this is about the lowest I have seen your point totals…I’m sure you’ll increase them quickly! Can’t wait to see your adventures in New England. Trying to plan another trip up their sometime…I just loved everything about it when we went in October of 2019.
Yeah, it’s weird having such (relatively) low points balances as for most of the road trip they’ve been at 2.5-3.5 million. I’ve been trying to balance using points for stays in the next 6 months with wanting to save them for later in 2024, while also not wanting to still have a ton of points by the end of the road trip if those points could save us money in the meantime!
As for those redemptions, you’re right with a Vacasa booking for Wyndham. We’re also currently booked in for 5 nights at the Conrad Maldives. We were originally planning on adding somewhere else after that, but now we’re thinking we might just extend our time there. I’d love to check out the Waldorf Astoria or one of the two Hyatt properties, but that adds on another two round trip seaplane and/or yacht journeys which adds $$$$ to the trip.