Road Trip Stats: Month 74 – February 2024

Oh dear.

When writing about our stats for January 2024, I said the following when looking ahead to our spending for February:

I’m a little pessimistic about our chances to staying under budget. Our combined spending on accommodation and pet fees is going to be fairly high. The extra mileage we’ll be putting on our car means we’ll likely be spending more on gas, while staying in Key West will no doubt be expensive between parking fees and eating/drinking out.

I should’ve been a lot pessimistic rather than a little pessimistic because we blew out our budget last month and then some. Key West was indeed to blame, although I’m only a little sad about that as we had a lot of fun there!

Here’s our road trip stats for the 74th month of our 50 state road trip.

Miles Driven

February began with our car’s odometer reading at 213,802 miles. It ended at 217,238 which meant we drove 3,436 miles last month. That was almost 500 miles more than the 2,950 miles I’d predicted, although about 350 miles of that related to an unplanned overnight trip to Lewisburg, WV from Morgantown, WV and so I wasn’t too far off.

Looking ahead to our mileage for March, we’re currently in Indianapolis and will be moving on the Idaho over the course of the next week. That’ll be about 1,900 miles in and of itself, so in addition to driving to other places, grocery shopping, etc., I’ll predict we’ll put 2,650 miles on our car this month.

Money Spent

This is our biggest ouch in a long time. Our budget of $125 per day on our road trip has to cover everything – gas, hotels and Airbnbs, food (both eating in and eating out), activities, etc. February is a shorter month (although with it being a leap year it was slightly longer than normal) which meant our total budget was $3,625 for the month. By the end of February we’d spent $4,551.73. That’s $926.73 over budget, hence the ouch!

We ended up overspending in all kinds of categories. Accommodation was higher than average, the additional mileage meant we spent more on gas than we have in the last 18 months and we spent more on activities than normal.

At almost $900 though, eating and drinking out made up a huge portion of our overspend. Before heading to Key West, I’d assumed we’d want to have a few drinks, try Key Lime pie, etc., but I hadn’t anticipated quite how much we’d enjoy imbibing there. With 10 months left of the year, we have time to try to make up for that overspend, but we’ll see how that goes!

Here’s a breakdown of how we spent that money…

…and a chart tracking our spending so far this year.

Looking ahead to our spending in March, I’m mildly optimistic about our ability to stay under budget. Our accommodation spending won’t be low, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll be excessively high either. Our gas expenditure will likely be higher than average, but we’ll mostly be in hotels suites and Airbnbs with kitchens, so hopefully we won’t spend as much on eating out.

One possibly higher-than-average category will be hotel pet fees. As things stand, it’s looking like having Truffles with us will cost $400 this month due to those hotel pet fees. Fingers crossed that some of those properties forget to charge the fee, particularly the ones with a $100 fee!

Accommodation Cost

February was a busy month for moving around as we stayed in a total of 10 different places. Here’s where we visited and how we paid for the stays.

February 1-3: Vacasa rental in Miami, FL (this one). Vacasa has a partnership with Wyndham Rewards which allows you to redeem 15,000 Wyndham points per night for every bedroom a property has. This property only had one bedroom, plus we get a 10% discount when redeeming points thanks to having a Wyndham credit card, so we only had to redeem 13,500 Wyndham Rewards points per night.

February 3-10: Vacasa rental in Key West, FL (this one). Similar to the Sunny Isles Beach property above, this was classed as a one bedroom property, although it was a studio rather than having a separate bedroom and living room. That meant it costs 15,000 points per night, which was reduced to 13,500 Wyndham Rewards points per night due to having their credit card.

February 10-11: Hampton Inn in Jacksonville, FL. After finishing up in Key West, it was time to make the long drive up to West Virginia. We stopped in a couple of places along the way, the first of which was Jacksonville. We booked this with 30,000 Hilton Honors points.

February 11-12: Kimpton Tryon Park in Charlotte, NC. Our next overnight stop was in Charlotte, NC where we used a soon-to-expire IHG free night certificate. Those certificates are valid on nights costing up to 40,000 points and this would’ve been 33,000 points, so we didn’t have to top it up with additional points.

February 12-16: Holiday Inn Martinsburg, WV (review to come in the next week or two). If you have an IHG Premier, Traveler or Business credit card, you get every 4th night free on award stays. With this being a four night stay, that reduced our cost to 51,000 points. I also have an IHG Select credit card which gives a 10% points rebate on award stays, making the net cost 11,475 IHG One Rewards points per night. We bought those points at 0.5cpp (cents per point), so cash-wise it effectively cost us $57.38 per night which is great value.

February 16-22: Airbnb in Morgantown, WV (this one). Despite only needing it for six nights (well, five in the end – more about that in a moment), we booked a week-long stay as the discount for booking a week made it slightly cheaper than booking a six night stay. The cost for the week was $633, although paying with discounted Airbnb gift cards reduced the cost for our six nights to $89.68 per night.

February 18-19: Home2 Suites Lewisburg, WV. At the last minute we decided to go down to visit Lewisburg for the day. Thankfully there were a few hotel options (considering it’s a relatively small town) and we booked one night at the Home2 Suites using 35,000 Hilton Honors points.

February 22-24: Aloft Cincinnati West Chester, OH. We have a couple of friends in Ohio who we wanted to see on our drive across to Indiana, so we stopped there for the weekend and stayed at this Aloft. The rate was $150.76 per night which was more expensive than some of the other rates available at that hotel. However, the reason I picked that more expensive rate is because we had a Marriott Amex Offer on one of our cards giving $100 back when spending $300+. That higher rate pushed us slightly over the $300 spending threshold seeing as we stayed two nights which means the $100 statement credit made our net cost $100.76 per night.

February 24-26: New Harmony Inn Resort and Conference Center in New Harmony, IN (see my review here). Shae had been really keen on visiting New Harmony and I’m so glad we did as it was a wonderful place to spend a couple of days. At $166.41 per night, the hotel was more expensive than we’d usually spend. However, we booked this towards the end of last year using the $300 travel credit on Shae’s Capital One Venture X card which was due to expire at the end of the year. That didn’t make the stay almost free seeing as the $300 credit comes off the back of the card’s $395 annual fee, but it did help ensure the credit didn’t go to waste which was nice.

February 26-March 1: Airbnb in Indianapolis, IN (this one). This Airbnb was fantastic value considering it’s a 3 bedroom apartment. It cost $96.67 per night, but paying with discounted Airbnb gift cards reduced the cost to $87 per night.

Hotel Points Earned

February was an excellent month for earning points, although very few of those came as a result of hotel stays. Most of the increases in IHG, Marriott and Chase Ultimate Rewards points came about from credit card referral bonuses.

The Hyatt increase was from a transfer in from my Ultimate Rewards account, while the Wyndham and Hilton points came from spending on their credit cards.

• IHG One Rewards – 54,290
• Hilton Honors – 69,334
• Marriott Bonvoy – 46,690
• World of Hyatt – 97,177
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 32,452
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 503,768
• Capital One – 390
• Citi ThankYou – 0

Hotel Points Redeemed

I didn’t do much award booking in February, so the number of points we redeemed was minimal compared to normal.

• IHG One Rewards – 0
• Hilton Honors – 65,000
• Marriott Bonvoy – 0
• World of Hyatt – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 95,000
• Capital One – 0
• Citi ThankYou – 0

Total Hotel Points Balances

Based on those changes, here’s how our balances ended on February 29.

• IHG One Rewards – 308,996
• Hilton Honors – 284,824
• Marriott Bonvoy – 131,640
• World of Hyatt – 213,754
• Choice Privileges – 135,651
• Wyndham Rewards – 111,454
• Hotels.com OneKey – $19.26
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 682,730
• Capital One – 317,722
• Citi ThankYou – 64,596

Here’s all that information in table format:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

There was a bit of an increase in the number of hotel free night certificates we had by the end of February versus the month before. We got another Hilton certificate from renewing one of our Hilton Aspire credit cards and another Marriott certificate from renewing one of those credit cards.

We increased our number of Hyatt certificates by two, although that was due to cancelling a couple of one night stays where we’d planned to use them.

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

Blog Stats

With February being a shorter month and us spending so much time driving, we didn’t have as much time to publish as many blog posts as normal.

• Number of blog posts published – 7
• Page views – 9,005

Final Thoughts

February was an appalling month for our budget, but I guess there was a silver lining in that we did manage to boost our hotel points balances quite a bit which will hopefully help reduce our hotel expenditure later in the year.