When writing last month’s stats post, I mentioned that I wasn’t too optimistic about how our budget would fare in July. We were due to stay in paid accommodation for much of the month and the room rate meant we’d be spending more on accommodation in July than we do on average.
Having said that, I’d been hopeful that we’d be able to get the hotel taxes waived for our stay because we were staying more than 30 nights. Although I was fairly confident we were eligible for the taxes to be waived, it wasn’t something we’d ever done before seeing as we normally only stay in one place for 5-7 nights. I therefore still had a little uncertainty as to whether that would work out.
In the end, it did work out which cut the cost of our hotel stay by ~$325 (you can read more about how it worked in my post over at Frequent Miler). Was that enough to keep us under budget during July though? Read on to find out.
Miles Driven
We began the month of July with 141,527 miles on our car’s odometer. By the time July 31 hit, its reading was 143,476 which means we drove 1,949 miles last month.
In last month’s stats post I predicted that we’d drive 1,900 miles, so that was – for once – a fairly accurate guess.
As for how far we’ll drive in August, it’s hard to know. We’re spending nearly all month in Florida holed up in an Airbnb, so other than going grocery shopping and (hopefully) swimming with manatees, our car will just be sitting in the garage. We’re due to check out on the 29th though and we don’t have any definite plans yet. We’ll likely be heading up to Maryland for a month, so our car’s mileage will depend on if we make that journey over the course of August 29-31, or if we stop somewhere along the way for a week or so. The latter option is under consideration because we’ll both be busy working, so making that long journey isn’t ideal.
If we do get to Maryland by the end of August, I’ll predict we’ll drive 1,650 miles. If we stop somewhere along the way, I’ll predict we’ll only drive 1,000 miles.
Money Spent
So, did that ~$325 in waived hotel taxes result in us staying below budget? As always, our budget on the road trip is $100 per day – that has to cover hotels/Airbnbs, gas, food, activities (for as little as we’re doing anything right now due to COVID-19), cell phones, etc.
With July having 31 days in it, that meant we had up to $3,100 we could spend if we didn’t want to go over. By the end of the month we’d spent $2,943.67 which means we were $156.33 under budget, so those waived hotel taxes made a big difference. We were $165.73 over budget in June, so this $156.33 helps to almost cancel out that previous overspend. It also means that we’re back to being under budget for 2020 so far.
We ended up spending ~$1,300 on hotels in July which wasn’t too bad considering. Not only did the waived taxes help with that, but we also paid for our stay with Marriott gift cards I’d bought when they had a 20% off sale recently. Without those discounted gift cards, that ~$1,300 figure would otherwise have been ~$1,550 and so we would’ve end up over budget.
Our combined spending on food (both eating in and eating out) was only $430.84 which was the least we’ve spent in those categories since we set off on our 50 state road trip on January 1, 2018. In theory, we did actually spend more than that on food though. I have an American Express Hilton Aspire credit card and they’re temporarily allowing you to use the card’s $250 resort credit for dining purchases seeing as people aren’t traveling as much right now due to COVID-19. I therefore didn’t include that dining spend in our budget as it was effectively free food.
n.b. The Hilton Aspire credit card normally has a $450 annual fee which is how they can afford to include benefits like a $250 resort credit. I applied for the card last year when they were waiving the annual fee in the first year, so it’s not like the ~$250 we spent on dining on that card is money that had already come out of our pockets in the form of an annual fee.
Speaking of credit card annual fees, we paid $287 in fees last month. Those were for three hotel credit cards that come with free night certificates, which is why we’re (sort of) happy to pay those annual fees.
Here’s a breakdown of our spending in July…
…and a chart that shows our overall spending for 2020 so far.
Looking ahead to our budget for the month of August, it could be a close run thing. About 2/3 of our budget is being eaten up by accommodation costs seeing as we’re staying in an Airbnb nearly all month. That’ll make it harder to stay under budget, despite the fact that we’re not going to be doing much for the rest of the month.
I’m going to guess that we’ll end up $100 over budget, but I’d love to be wrong and have us underspend.
Accommodation Cost
Shae, Truffles and I spent the first few weeks of July at the Residence Inn Cincinnati North/West Chester (you can read my review here), with the last nine days spent in hotels which were paid for using points.
Here’s a breakdown of how much that all cost:
July 1-23: Residence Inn Cincinnati North/West Chester, Ohio – $79 per night. The net cost was only $63.20 per night though due to paying with the discounted gift cards I mentioned earlier.
July 23-30: Hyatt Place Cleveland/Independence, Ohio – 5,000 World of Hyatt points per night, so a total of 35,000 points. Our net cost was lower though due to a couple of promotions Hyatt is running. We got 2,500 points back as it was our first stay during this promotion and a rebate of 25% of our points (8,750 points) thanks to this promotion.
Our net cost was therefore only 23,750 points for the entire stay, or 3,393 points per night which is an excellent deal for Hyatt.
July 30-31: Country Inn & Suites London, Kentucky – 22,500 points for the night. We got back 5,000 points from their latest promotion for a net cost of 17,500 Radisson Rewards points. We won’t be reviewing this hotel as we were only there one night, but we stayed there last year and so you can check out our review here.
July 31-August 1: Red Roof Inn Macon, Georgia – This would have cost us $86.76 for the night, but we paid for it using Hotels.com Rewards credits. As a result, we only had to pay $5 for the room tax.
Hotel Points Earned
Our biggest chunk of hotel points earned in July was with Marriott, mainly due to our month-long paid stay at a Residence Inn. We also picked up a number of other types of hotel points, most of which came from credit card spend.
Here’s a breakdown of what we earned last month:
- IHG Rewards Club – 1,650
- Hilton Honors – 27,387
- Marriott Bonvoy – 45,400
- World of Hyatt – 9,341
- Radisson Rewards – 12,063
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 15,143
Hotel Points Redeemed
After having 2-3 months of redeeming very few hotel points, that changed in July. We didn’t make a ton of redemptions, but the last week and a half of July was spent in hotels booked using points, plus we’ve booked a tentative stay using points for the first week of October.
As a result, here’s a breakdown of the points we redeemed:
- IHG Rewards Club – 0
- Hilton Honors – 98,000
- Marriott Bonvoy – 0
- World of Hyatt – 35,000
- Radisson Rewards – 22,500
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 10
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0
Total Hotel Points Balances
Although we redeemed more points in July than we earned, we still have a very healthy stash of points.
- IHG Rewards Club – 685,482
- Hilton Honors – 867,663
- Marriott Bonvoy – 479,636
- World of Hyatt – 126,222
- Radisson Rewards – 271,192
- Choice Privileges – 38,643
- Wyndham Rewards – 46,600
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 10
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 372,815
Here’s all that information in table form:
Jogging
Um…the less said about this the better. I’m avoiding hotel fitness rooms right now due to COVID-19, while it’s been too hot to go jogging outside.
August will be the same because 90+ degree temperatures and high humidity mean jogging outside isn’t going to happen. I’m trying to get some kind of exercise though, so I’ve committed to swimming in the pool at our Airbnb every day – proper swimming, not just paddling around!
Blog Stats
After hitting low points in March and April, our traffic has gradually been heading in the right direction since then. That trend continued in July with more page views than the month before that.
- Number of blog posts published – 7
- Page views – 28,490
Final Thoughts
It was very pleasing to stay under budget in July and thus get back under budget for the year. Another bonus from July was our blog page views increasing almost 30% compared to the previous month.
August’s budget might not be quite as healthy, but we hopefully won’t blow too far over it either. Stay tuned for how that goes.
BethC says
Eagerly awaiting the manatee report! We were supposed to do that with friends from California in late March. Bad pandemic!
Beth says
My family was trying to plan a manatee trip too, but out the window that went… Swimming is a great way to get some exercise in the FL heat!
stephen says
I’d forgotten how enjoyable it was to go swimming. Even though we usually stay in hotels with swimming pools, I never make the effort to go in them. Having the pool right outside the kitchen door has made a big difference to my motivation!
It’s a shame you weren’t able to swim with the manatees yourself – hopefully you get to make it back to do that in the future 🙂
dotti says
keep the reports coming