Road Trip Stats: Month 30 – Jun 2020

Our May stats were better than normal from a budget perspective as we managed to stay almost $350 under budget thanks to fairly low accommodation costs and the fact that we didn’t do many activities due to COVID-19.

I didn’t think June’s budget would go quite so well as our accommodation was due to be a little more expensive, we’d be spending more on gas seeing as we’d be driving from Kansas to Ohio and we had a vet appointment scheduled for Truffles.

Would there be enough leeway for us to stay under budget though, or would we end up overspending? Read on to find out.

Miles Driven

We started June with 140,120 miles on the clock, while the odometer showed 141,527 miles by the end of the month which means we drove 1,407 miles last month.

My prediction was that we’d drive 1,150 miles, so although I was only off by a few hundred miles, percentage-wise I was pretty far off.

We’re heading south at the end of July, so we’ll likely rack up more miles compared to last month. I’ll therefore predict that we’ll drive 1,900 miles in July.

Money Spent

We budget $100 per day for our road trip which has to cover everything – gas, food, accommodation, activities, hotel pet fees, etc. We also include things like credit card annual fees seeing as those are usually related to our road trip such as providing free night certificates for hotels, dining credits, etc.

Seeing as there were 30 days in June, our monthly budget was $3,000. By the end of the month we’d spent $3,165.73 which means we went $165.73 over budget.

I’m afraid we have Truffles to blame for that.

From dog food to a vet visit to new toys to getting groomed, we spent just over $330 on her in June which was far more than normal and accounts for all of our overspend.

Our grocery spend of ~$700 was higher than normal, but our expenditure on eating out was less than $115 which was our lowest yet on the road trip. Other than that, there wasn’t much notable about our spend last month.

Here’s a chart providing a breakdown of our spending in June…

…as well as a chart tracking our spending in 2020 so far.

I’m as certain as I can be that we’ll be going over budget in July too. Most of the month is being spent in paid accommodation and although the cost for our hotel is reasonable as 1 bedroom suites go, it still means we’ll be spending more on accommodation than normal.

We’ll also be driving more which likely means our gas costs will be higher, although we have a lot of Kroger fuel points to help with that. Our car’s air conditioning compressor had to be replaced this past week as well; we’ve paid for that up-front, but on our budget we’re spreading out the cost of it over the course of a year. Despite mitigating its impact on our budget for July, that’s still an extra $100 per month added to our budget.

Accommodation Cost

The first 2.5 weeks of the month were spent in a cheap Airbnb in Wichita, then we stayed one night just outside of St Louis using points on our way to Ohio.

In Cincinnati, we’ve been staying in a hotel we’re paying for rather than using points which is why our accommodation was more expensive in June and will continue being so in July. We’re paying for the stay using Marriott gift cards we bought for 20% off a couple of months ago which has helped reduce some of that expense.

This cost might actually get reduced further, in which case we’ll account for that on next month’s stats. That because I recently realized that we don’t have to pay tax on our hotel stay because we’re staying for more than 30 days. That should save us several hundred bucks, but I have to stop back by the front desk to sort that out.

Here’s a breakdown of how much our accommodation cost last month which takes into account the savings from discounted gift cards for Marriott that I mentioned above, as well as discounted gift cards for Airbnb.

June 1-19: Airbnb in Wichita, KS – $36.40 per night for a total of $655.20.

June 20: Candlewood Suites in Ofallon, IL – $0 per night for a total of $0.

June 21-30: Residence Inn in Cincinnati, OH – $71.10 per night for a total of $782.10.

I clicked through to book the Residence Inn from the Simply Best Coupons shopping portal before making the reservation, so we should earn ~$78.21 cashback provided it tracked properly and pays out after our stay.

Points Earned

Our hotel points balances got a nice boost last month for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that some of our credit cards are temporarily offering an increased number of bonus points for spending at grocery stores, so I’ve been doing some gift card buying and reselling to take advantage of those. The other reason is that we earned 40,000 bonus points from renewing one of our Radisson Rewards credit cards.

Here’s a breakdown of all our hotel point earnings in June.

• IHG Rewards Club – 525
• Hilton Honors – 76,236
• Marriott Bonvoy – 49,280
• World of Hyatt – 19,008
• Radisson Rewards – 40,000
• Choice Privileges – 3,678
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 28,479

Points Redeemed

Other than our one night stay in Illinois on our way to Ohio, we didn’t redeem any points last month.

• IHG Rewards Club – 10,000
• Hilton Honors – 0
• Marriott Bonvoy – 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

Thanks to all the additional points we earned last month, our total points balances looked even more healthy by the end of June than they did at the beginning of the month.

• IHG Rewards Club – 683,832
• Hilton Honors – 938,276
• Marriott Bonvoy – 434,236
• World of Hyatt – 151,881
• Radisson Rewards – 281,629
• Choice Privileges – 38,643
• Wyndham Rewards – 46,600
• Hotels.com Welcome Rewards Credits – 20
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 357,672

Here’s a breakdown of all those figures in table format:

Jogging

We went from hot and humid weather in Kansas to hot and humid weather in Ohio. Although our hotel has a fitness room, I’m not comfortable using it due to COVID-19 and how long water droplets stay in the air. I’d say barely 25% of guests are wearing masks while walking through the hotel and only about 50% of the hotel staff are wearing masks, so I’m not overly optimistic about how much effort they’d be putting into keeping equipment sanitized seeing as they’re not requiring mask-wearing by staff.

It was therefore tempting to “accidentally” forget to include my jogging stats from June because they were almost non-existent. I only ran 7.57 miles and I doubt July will be any better. I’m hoping I get back on track exercise-wise in August; I doubt I’ll be jogging, but we’ll be staying in an Airbnb with a swimming pool, so I’m hoping I have the motivation to get some lengths in every day.

Blog Stats

Although the general travel industry hasn’t recovered from COVID-19, our blog traffic has been picking up over the last month or two thanks to people reading posts about outdoor activities we’ve done in the past like finding trolls in Belgium and various hikes around the US.

Here are some of our blog stats from last month:

• Number of blog posts published – 6
• Page views – 22,005

Final Thoughts

Our stats for June 2020 were a mixed bag. We went over budget and my jogging effort was embarrassing, but our hotel points balances got a nice boost and our website traffic improved again.

Based on what I’m seeing so far, I’ve a feeling I’ll be able to write that exact same paragraph when putting together our stats for July!