Road Trip Stats: Month 10 – October 2018

Heading in to October, I wasn’t overly optimistic about our ability to stay on budget during the month.

Our accommodation costs (including pet fees) were due to be over 50% of our budget, so that wouldn’t leave much to play with. We also knew we’d be visiting the State Fair of Texas and Formula 1 US Grand Prix, two places that would be expensive to eat at.

So did we go way over budget or did we somehow manage to spend less than expected? Read on to find out.

Miles Driven

In last month’s set of road trip stats, I’d predicted that we’d drive 2,500 miles during October. We started the month with 99,430 miles on the car and by October 31 there were 101,395 miles on the clock. That means we only drove 1,965 miles in October, much less than I thought.

My original guesstimate wasn’t unreasonable though. Our 12 days in Dallas were a washout as there was an inordinate amount of rain, meaning we didn’t get to do anywhere near as much as we’d been expecting. All the things we’d planned to do in the Dallas/Fort Worth area weren’t too close to the hotel we were staying at, so if we’d been able to do those we’d likely have added ~500 miles to our total.

Despite being 20% off with my guess last month, I’ll make a prediction for how many miles I think we’ll drive in November. We’re staying in six different cities all around the state and are due to be making quite a few day trips to other areas. My prediction is therefore that we’ll drive 3,250 miles in November. I’d love to be wrong about that as that equates to a lot of time in the car, so we’ll see in a few weeks how accurate that guess was.

Money Spent

On to the juicy part of our stats – our budget. I’d mentioned earlier that I wasn’t overly optimistic that we’d be able to stay within budget.

If you’re new to our stats series, we’ve set ourselves a budget of $100 per day on our 50 state road trip. That has to include accommodation, gas, food, drink, activities, etc. With 31 days in October, that meant we had $3,100 to play with.

We ended October having spent $3,066.40 which means we were $33.60 under budget. That was unexpected and can mostly be attributed to the bad weather in Dallas. That greatly reduced our expenses on activities, so at least something positive came out of being stuck in the hotel so much! We also had a couple of hotels not charge the full pet fee which helped us stay below budget.

As always, here’s a breakdown of what we spent our money on…

…and an update of how our budget has progressed throughout the year.

Points Earned

We managed to add to our points balances during October. I’d had a couple of spending offers on my SPG American Express credit card, with one of those bonuses hitting my account last month.

My World of Hyatt points balance also greatly increased for a couple of reasons. They’re running a generous promotion at the moment, so I earned quite a few points from that seeing as most of our stays in October were at Hyatt Place properties. I also cancelled a future points stay to rebook it as a paid stay thanks to a low rate, so 35,000 points were credited back to my account.

Here’s a list of how many points we earned last month across the different hotel loyalty programs we’re members of:

• IHG Rewards Club – 500
• Hilton Honors – 1,806
• Marriott Rewards – 34,328
• World of Hyatt – 60,140
• Radisson Rewards – 1,200
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 7,447

Points Redeemed

All our stays through the end of the year were booked before October began, so we didn’t redeem any points in October.

That makes the list below simple to complete!

• IHG Rewards Club – 0
• Hilton Honors – 0
• Marriott Rewards – 0
• World of Hyatt – 0
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0

Total Points Balances

Based on the points we earned and didn’t redeem, here’s what our total points balances look like heading in to November:

• IHG Rewards Club – 395,178
• Hilton Honors – 684,471
• Marriott Rewards – 666,076
• World of Hyatt – 83,302
• Radisson Rewards – 336,383
• Choice Privileges – 39,251
• Wyndham Rewards – 45,000
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 10
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 231,552

Here’s that information in table format:

Blog Stats

Seeing as we didn’t do much in Dallas, we published fewer posts than normal in October as there was less to write about. Here are a couple of blog-related stats from last month:

• Number of blog posts published – 21
• Page views – 16,350

Final Thoughts

It was a pleasant surprise to be under budget last month. I’m not convinced the same thing will happen in November, but we’ll be trying to stay as close to our budget as possible.

Our accommodation costs (including pet fees) are due to be close to 60% of our expenses, so that doesn’t leave much leeway. We’ll be earning a bunch of points from those hotel stays though, so that’ll at least help us get some free stays in the future.