Road Trip Stats: Month 84 – December 2024

This is it!

For the last seven years we’ve published our road trip stats each month, sharing in greater detail quantitative data about that previous month when it came to miles driven, how much we spent, how many hotel points we earned and redeemed, etc. Our road trip officially ended on December 31, 2024, so with this latest stats post covering that month, this will be the last monthly road trip stats post.

Having said that, that’s not going to be the end of the stats we share – I imagine some of you will be pleased and some will be disappointed! At the start of each year, we’ve published a stats post which recaps the previous year by the numbers. We did that from 2018-2023, so we’ll be doing another one of those for 2024 in the next week or two (here it is!)

Now that the road trip has ended, I also thought it would be fun to do a stats recap of the entire seven years we’ve been on the road, giving overall totals of how much we spent in that time, how many miles we drove, which hotel brands we stayed at the most, etc. I’m planning on doing that once we’ve finished sharing about everything we did in Hawaii (our 50th state), so that final stats post likely won’t be for another month or two.

In the meantime, here are road trip stats for December 2024.

Miles Driven

December started with are car having driven 237,150 miles over the course of its life (not just on the road trip). By the end of the month its odometer reading was 238,079 miles which means we drove 929 miles in December.

That total wasn’t very high because we drove from Las Vegas, NV to Denver, CO and left our car at a friend’s house there. We then flew to Hawaii where we rented cars, so that’s all the mileage that got put on to it last month.

We did therefore drive more than those 929 miles in December, but we didn’t keep track of how far we actually drove in Hawaii.

Money Spent

We managed to underspend fairly significantly from September-November which meant that we were ever-so-slightly under budget for the year as a whole. Going into December though, I knew that this wouldn’t last.

That’s because pretty much all of December was going to be spent in Hawaii. That’s not a cheap place to visit as everything – from accommodation to rental cars to food to activities and more – is expensive.

We managed to mitigate some of that cost by booking all four weeks of our accommodation using hotel points. However, we did need rental cars on each island, gas was expensive and we wanted to have fun while we were there, so we still ended up spending far more on non-accommodation spending than we normally would.

Our road trip budget is $125 per day, so with 31 days in December our budget for the month was $3,875. We ended December having spent $5,225.92, so that means we overspent by $1,350.92.

Overspending by such a significant amount is, on the one hand, a little disappointing. However, overspending itself didn’t come as any surprise, although the scale of it did a little! Ultimately, we went over budget by less than $45 per day which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t bad for pretty much an entire month in Hawaii. Much of the overspend came about as a result of our various rental cars which came to almost $1,000. We also spent a lot over the course of the month on eating out and drinks, but there were so many restaurants and dining experiences we didn’t want to miss out on, so it was worth it.

Here’s a breakdown of our expenditure (rental cars got allocated to household spending seeing as we don’t have a separate category for that)…

…and here’s a table tracking our spending over the entirety of 2024. Our budget for 2024 was $42,625 and we ended up spending $43,944.49, so we went $1,319.49 over budget over the course of the year.

Accommodation Cost

Here’s a breakdown of what we spent on hotels and vacation rentals in December 2024:

December 1-4: Airbnb in Las Vegas (this one). We’d booked this stay from November 3-December 4 despite not needing a few of those days because it was cheaper to book a month-long stay (and thereby receive a larger discount) than it was to book the specific dates we needed. The total cost was $1,999.64, but we paid with Airbnb gift cards we’d bought at a discount which reduced the cost to $1,779.40. That means it effectively cost us $65.90 per night for the nights we actually needed it for.

December 1-2: Super 8 Green River, UT. We’d originally booked our flight to Hawaii to fly out of Phoenix on December 5, so we could’ve made that drive in a day by leaving Vegas on December 4. However, we changed our plans to fly out of Denver which was a longer drive, so we left a few days earlier. We made an overnight stop along the way in Green River, UT which cost $70.94.

December 2-5: Hyatt House Denver Airport, CO. Trying to bring our dog Truffles with us to Hawaii would’ve been like trying to take her to a foreign country due to all the rules and regulation surrounding that. That, and the $1,000+ we would’ve had to spend on airline and pet fees, meant she stayed with our friends in Denver.

Those friends also kept our car and other stuff we didn’t need in Hawaii, so leading up to our flight there we had to sort through all our stuff. We therefore stayed a few nights in Denver to give us a chance to sort through everything and then drop Truffles and our car off at theirs. We stayed at the Hyatt House Denver Airport as it had an airport shuttle. This cost us 8,000 World of Hyatt points per night.

December 5-12: Grand Hyatt Kauai, HI (review coming in the next few weeks). This cost us 25,000 World of Hyatt points per night.

December 12-14: Hana-Maui Resort, HI. We spent a couple of nights at this property, booking it using a category 1-7 Hyatt free night certificate for one of the nights and 25,000 Hyatt points for the other night.

December 14-19: Hyatt Regency Maui Resort & Spa, HI. This was also booked using Hyatt points; it was 25,000 points per night for the first four nights and 30,000 points for the 5th night.

December 19-26: Vacasa vacation rental in Kailua-Kona, HI (this one). Vacasa has had a partnership with Wyndham for the last few years which enables you to book vacation rental properties using Wyndham points; you can read more about the intricacies of it here. It would normally have cost 15,000 points per night, but I have the Wyndham business credit card which gives a 10% discount on award stays, so that got reduced to 13,500 Wyndham Rewards points per night.

December 26-January 1: Shell Vacations Club Waikiki Marina Resort at the llikai on Oahu, HI. This is a timeshare resort which can also be booked with Wyndham points. Similar to the Vacasa property, it normally costs 15,000 points per night, but the Wyndham business credit card reduced that to 13,500 Wyndham Rewards points per night.

Hotel Points Earned

We had some large changes to our points balances in December. IHG gave an opportunity for me to extend my Diamond status for another year when buying 120,000 points. Those points were being sold for a good price which I might’ve been interested in anyway, so the Diamond status (which gets us free breakfast at IHG properties and a better chance of room upgrades) was the cherry on top.

The increases in most of the other programs were mostly thanks to credit card spending in categories that gave bonus points.

• IHG One Rewards – 120,675
• Hilton Honors – 52,017
• Marriott Bonvoy – 336
• World of Hyatt – 3,521
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 37,327
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 73,038
• Capital One – 79,771
• Citi ThankYou – 2,070

Hotel Points Redeemed

On the redemption side of things, we transferred 50,000 Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt for upcoming award stays and booked a couple of IHG stays too. The Wyndham redemption was for a stay in the UK in April via Cottages.com (another partner Wyndham has, similar to Vacasa).

• IHG One Rewards – 33,000
• Hilton Honors – 0
• Marriott Bonvoy – 0
• World of Hyatt – 47,500
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 121,500
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 50,000
• Capital One – 0
• Citi ThankYou – 0

Total Hotel Points Balances

Based on those changes, here’s how our hotel points balances finished at the end of December and at the end of the road trip. Despite redeeming a ton of points this year, we still ended the road trip with more than 2 million hotel points which isn’t too shabby!

• IHG One Rewards – 362,990
• Hilton Honors – 440,714
• Marriott Bonvoy – 257,261
• World of Hyatt – 152,016
• Choice Privileges – 24,351
• Wyndham Rewards – 25,125
• Hotels.com OneKey – $22.35
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 500,813
• Capital One – 350,106
• Citi ThankYou – 81,919

Here’s a table displaying all that information:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

We had a few changes to our lineup of hotel free night certificates. One of our IHG credit cards renewed which means we got another certificate for them. Two more Hilton credit cards were courtesy of putting enough spend on a couple of Hilton credit cards before the end of the year, while the 40k Marriott certificate was from earning Titanium status (that was the Choice benefit I selected).

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

Blog Stats

We were so busy exploring Hawaii in December that we only got seven new blog posts published. Our page views increased compared to the previous month though so that was nice to see, even if they aren’t anywhere near as high as we’d like.

• Number of blog posts published – 7
• Page views – 9,525

Final Thoughts

We came so close to staying under budget for the year as a whole, but spending a month in Hawaii is going to put anyone over budget!