Road Trip Stats: Month 71 – November 2023

2023 hasn’t been great for our road trip budget. Heading in to November we were more than $2,500 over budget for the year, with most of that overspend being due to accommodation, eating and drinking out and, at times, spending a surprising amount on groceries.

I said in last month’s stats post that I was mildly optimistic about our ability to stay under budget in November. As it turns out, that outlook was unduly pessimistic as we ended up coming in way below budget for once.

Here are our road trip stats for November where we share more about our budget, as well as how much we drove, a breakdown of our accommodation costs, how many hotel points we earned and redeemed and more.

Miles Driven

We started November with 208,648 miles on our car. By the end of the month we were at 209,845 which means we drove 1,197 miles. I’d predicted we’d drive 1,375 miles, so I wasn’t too far off there for once.

Looking ahead to our driving in December, I imagine it’ll be a little bit more than that. We’re in New Jersey for much of the month, but we drove to Baltimore last night for a show, Shae’s driving to Washington D.C. in a couple of weeks for a Madonna concert, then we’re heading up to New York City for New Year’s Eve. In between we’re moving around a little bit in New Jersey, so I’ll predict we’ll drive 1,750 miles in December.

Money Spent

Our daily budget on the road trip is $125 which has to cover all our expenses – accommodation, food, activities, gas, hotel pet fees, etc. November’s 30 days meant our total budget for the month was $3,750. By the end of the month we’d spent $3,155.77 which means we were $594.23 under budget – a superb result!

There were a few factors in this underspend. Our accommodation spending was less than it had been for much of the year, while our expenditure on eating out was only $144.23 which is the third lowest it’s been during the 71 months of our road trip so far. It was that low because we’ve both been so busy working recently that we haven’t had time to go out and do anything!

It could have been even better if hotel pet fees hadn’t been so expensive. At $355 across the month, that was the fifth most we’ve spent in that category on the road trip.

Here’s a breakdown of our spending in November…

…along with a chart tracking our spending so far this year.

Accommodation Cost

November and December are busy times for me work-wise, so we normally try to minimize how much we move around in that time. Despite that, we ended up staying in five different places during that time.

Here’s where we stayed and how we paid for them.

November 1-2: Hampton Inn Salem, MA (review to come soon). This was the third night of a three night stay. Due to how expensive Salem is during Halloween, we redeemed a free night certificate for this stay.

November 2-10: Holiday Inn Express Plymouth, MA. IHG uses dynamic award pricing which means the number of points you have to redeem can change from night to night. For the 8 nights we stayed the price ranged from 20,000-30,000 points per night.

I have the IHG Premier credit card which gives every 4th night free on award stays which means we got both the 4th and 8th nights free. I also get a 10% points rebate on award stays from my IHG Select credit card, so our net cost was 16,313 point per night. We bought those points for 0.5cpp (cents per point) which means our stay effectively cost $81.57 per night which is much cheaper than the $152.14 room rate that would’ve been charged if we’d paid cash.

November 10-20: Hyatt House Mt Laurel, NJ (review to come soon). This hotel is a category 1 property in the World of Hyatt program which means it costs 3,500, 5,000 or 6,500 points per night depending on if it’s at off-peak, standard or peak pricing. For our dates the nights were a mix of 5,000 and 6,500 points per night.

November 15-17: Thompson New York Central Park, NY. We managed to get tickets to see The Late Show With Stephen Colbert being recorded in NYC, so we had a quick two night getaway into the city seeing as it wasn’t too far from Mt Laurel. We stayed at the Thompson that’s only a couple of blocks from Central Park and redeemed 25,000 World of Hyatt points per night. The cash rate was just over $1,000 per night, so that gave us great value for our points.

November 20-December 1: Airbnb in Seaside Heights, NJ (this one). We booked a month-long stay which meant we got a discount for staying that long. The total cost was $2,093.56 and we paid with Airbnb gift cards we bought at a discount, so our net cost was $57.40 per night.

Hotel Points Earned

We had a nice boost to our hotel points balances in November. Most of the Marriott points came about as a result of a canceled award stay and bonus points received from a credit card referral. Most of the World of Hyatt points were transferred in from our Chase Ultimate Rewards accounts, while most of the Capital One miles were from the signup bonus on a new credit card. The bulk of the rest of the points were the result of bonus points earned from credit card spending.

• IHG One Rewards – 17,093
• Hilton Honors – 32,321
• Marriott Bonvoy – 135,598
• World of Hyatt – 95,083
• Choice Privileges – 100
• Wyndham Rewards – 47,356
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 97,390
• Capital One – 57,586

Hotel Points Redeemed

We didn’t do much award booking in November, so the only points we spent were Hyatt points for a couple of upcoming stays and Chase Ultimate Rewards points which were transferred to Hyatt.

• IHG One Rewards – 0
• Hilton Honors – 0
• Marriott Bonvoy – 0
• World of Hyatt – 66,500
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 85,000
• Capital One – 0

Total Hotel Points Balances

Based on those changes, here’s how our points balances finished at the end of November.

• IHG One Rewards – 437,704
• Hilton Honors – 371,206
• Marriott Bonvoy – 296,511
• World of Hyatt – 112,559
• Choice Privileges – 225,551
• Wyndham Rewards – 185,729
• Hotels.com OneKey – $19.26
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 305,358
• Capital One – 266,552

Here’s all that information in table format:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

There were several changes to the number of free night certificates we have. We redeemed an IHG cert for our stay in Baltimore last night. Another Hilton certificate was added to our collection, but we then redeemed three to extend our stay in the Maldives next year. We earned another Marriott certificate, but then redeemed all four for a stay in Florida next year. Finally, we earned a category 1-7 free night certificate with Hyatt, but used it soon after for a stay in New York City. Here’s what we’re left with:

• IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 2
• Hilton (any property worldwide) – 1
• Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 0
• Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 0
• Hyatt (category 1-4) – 3
• Hyatt (category 1-7) – 0

Blog Stats

Due to how hectic work has been for both of us, we only published six posts last month. Our number of page views has also had a huge drop over the last couple of months and I’m not sure why that would be. The only thing I can think is that Google must’ve had some kind of algorithm change which clearly sucks for us!

• Number of blog posts published – 6
• Page views – 11,465

Final Thoughts

Overall, it was a great month for our road trip stats. We stayed well under budget and earned far more hotel points than we redeemed. The only disappointing aspect has been the number of page views, so hopefully that picks up again in the coming months.