April brought about a few notable things on our road trip. We got our first COVID vaccine shot, we changed states when we moved on from New Mexico to Arizona, Shae’s mom and stepdad came to visit us for a week and it was my birthday.
It was also a month where our spending and budgeted amount were as close as they’ve been in the last nine months. But does that mean we went marginally over budget or did we manage to stay just under budget? Read on to find out that along with all our other stats.
Miles Driven
On April 1 our car’s odometer reading was 154,859 miles, while by the end of the month its reading was 157,805. That means we drove a total of 2,946 miles in April which was our highest mileage in a month since December 2019.
I’d predicted in last month’s stats that we’d drive 2,750 miles or more, so that proved to be accurate. Looking ahead to our mileage in May, our total should be much lower as we’re not going to be driving anywhere near as much. I’ll therefore predict that we’ll drive 925 miles, but it has the potential to be even lower than that. We don’t have our accommodation booked for the last few days of May though, so if we end up needing to drive a little further, our mileage could potentially be just over 1,000 miles for the month.
Money Spent
With 30 days in April, our budget of $100 per day meant we had $3,000 to play with last month. By the end of the month we’d spent $2,987.92 which means we managed to stay $12.08 under budget. That also makes it five months in a row we’ve managed to stay under budget which is easily our longest streak of doing so well with our budget on a month-to-month basis.
It was obviously a close-run thing though. With us driving far more miles in April than we normally do, our gas expenditure last month was more than $100 more than our average. We had a few credit cards renew, with their total fees coming to $279. That might sound like a lot, but we received some free night certificates from those cards which made the fees worth it.
We spent less than $600 on food (in terms of both eating in and getting take out) which is the lowest it’s been for nine months, so that helped mitigate some of those other increased expenses above.
Here’s a breakdown of our spending in April by category…
…along with a chart tracking our overall spending during 2021 so far.
Looking ahead to May’s budget, I’ve a feeling we’ll end up over budget by the end of the month. Although we don’t have our accommodation booked yet for the last few days of the month, it’s looking like about half our budget will be getting allocated towards hotels. When such a large proportion of our budget has to go towards accommodation, it usually results in us going over budget, but not always.
Accommodation Cost
We stayed at five different places in April – three using points and two stays that were paid for. Here’s how those were booked:
April 1-6: Hampton Inn Deming, NM (see review here). This hotel cost 10,000 points per night, but with the fifth night free benefit that Hilton has on award stays for people with status, those five nights only cost 40,000 points. A promotion that was running at the time earned us 5,000 points, plus the stay earned us an additional 10,000 points as I hit another Milestone Reward with Hilton Honors based on the number of nights we’ve stayed this year. That made the net cost for those five nights 25,000 points, or 5,000 points per night which was fantastic value.
April 6-16: Country Inn & Suites Tucson Airport, AZ (see our review from when we stayed there last year). A standard room at this property costs 15,000 points per night, but you can also book one bedroom suites for 22,500 points per night. We wanted to make sure we got a one bedroom suite rather than hoping we got an upgrade when checking in, so we redeemed 22,500 points per night for a total of 225,000 points.
April 16-20: Holiday Inn Phoenix Airport-North, AZ (see review here). This was another stay booked with points. IHG was charging 15,000 points per night for those dates (IHG uses dynamic pricing, so the points cost can vary), but it worked out even cheaper than that. The IHG Premier card gives us every fourth night free on award stays, so that reduced the net cost to 45,000 points. Our separate IHG Select card gives a 10% rebate when redeeming points, so that was another 4,500 points back. Finally, IHG awarded 500 bonus points as a welcome amenity, reducing our total outlay to 40,000 points for the four nights, or only 10,000 points per night.
April 20-26: Airbnb in Prescott Valley, AZ. Shae’s mom and stepdad came out to Arizona to spend a week with us and so we booked this wonderful Airbnb. Our contribution towards the cost was $80 per night.
April 26-31: Courtyard Flagstaff, AZ (review to be published in the coming weeks). This cost $143.13 per night with tax which, as hotel rates go in Flagstaff, wasn’t bad despite being far more than we usually pay for hotels. We paid with Marriott gift cards bought at a discount, so that reduced the cost to $123.13 per night.
Hotel Points Earned
We managed to boost our points balances with some hotel loyalty programs in April. One or two were thanks to credit card referrals, the large chunk of Hyatt points was mainly the result of a cancelled award stay and most of the Radisson points were due to reducing our Country Inn Tucson Airport stay from 11 to 10 nights.
Here’s a breakdown of what we earned:
- IHG Rewards – 527
- Hilton Honors – 25,720
- Marriott Bonvoy – 28,150
- World of Hyatt – 73,768
- Radisson Rewards – 22,750
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 4,447
- Capital One – 5,380
Hotel Points Redeemed
We only redeemed points with IHG Rewards in April which was for our stay at the Holiday Inn Phoenix Airport-North, along with a couple of upcoming award stays.
- IHG Rewards – 145,000
- Hilton Honors – 0
- Marriott Bonvoy – 0
- World of Hyatt – 0
- Radisson Rewards – 0
- Choice Privileges – 0
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0
- Capital One – 0
Total Hotel Points Balances
There wasn’t a particularly large change in our overall points balances because the large number of IHG points redeemed were offset to some extent by the number of points we earned in some other programs.
- IHG Rewards – 287,021
- Hilton Honors – 784,214
- Marriott Bonvoy – 676,119
- World of Hyatt – 85,690
- Radisson Rewards – 53,092
- Choice Privileges – 38,645
- Wyndham Rewards – 120,577
- Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 10
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 507,852
- Capital One – 73,322
As always, here’s all that information in table format.
Hotel Free Night Certificates
There’s been a couple of changes to the number of hotel free night certificates we had at the end of April. A couple of IHG certificates got redeemed, while we received an additional Hyatt certificate.
- IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 3
- Hilton (any property worldwide) – 3
- Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 2
- Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 2
- Hyatt (category 1-4) – 5
- Hyatt (category 1-7) – 2
Walking
I didn’t really track how much I walked in April. We did go on some long hikes, but I’m not sure I would’ve averaged the minimum of two miles per day that I wanted.
Blog Stats
Some of our posts from New Mexico seemed to get a reasonable amount of traffic last month, so it was nice to see a boost in our readership compared to what we’ve had in the past. I haven’t gone back through to compare against the stats since we started publishing them, but I think that might’ve been the highest number of page views in a month since we started the blog which is encouraging.
We also published a few more posts than we had in March, but I still have a lot of posts to catch up on!
- Number of blog posts published – 14
- Page views – 47,089
Final Thoughts
April 2021 was a fairly average month for our stats overall. We stayed slightly under budget and didn’t redeem too many more hotel points than we earned. Having said that, we drove more than we had done for more than a year and also had even more people reading the blog than in the past.
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