Road Trip Stats: Month 52 – April 2022

The first three months of this year weren’t great for our budget, primarily because we spent that time in California which is an expensive place to be.

I’d been hopeful that once we left California our budget would get back on track. Our spending in April went back and forth as to whether or not we’d stay under budget. In fact, the end result ended up being different than I thought as Shae noticed an error on our budget spreadsheet when reconciling our payment categories for this post.

Was that a good error or a bad error though? Read on to find out the answer to that question and all our other road trip stats for April 2022.

Miles Driven

We started April with our car’s odometer reading at 174,053 miles. By the end of the month it was at 177,876 miles which means we drove 3,823 miles in April which is the most in a long time and, without going back to check the first 51 months of our road trip, might be the most we’ve ever driven in a single month.

I’d predicted that we’d drive 2,200 miles last month, so I was waaaay off. Although I’d taken into account that we’d be driving a large loop from Arizona to New Mexico to Utah and then back to Arizona, I don’t think I’d properly accounted for the fact that we’d be doing a lot of driving on top of that from our Airbnbs to all the National Parks in Utah and Arizona. I will say though – it definitely felt like we drove almost 4,000 miles last month! We had an amazing time seeing everything, but it was a lot of time in the car.

Looking ahead to our mileage for May, it should be safe to say that we won’t be driving as much as 3,823 miles. Having said that, we’ll be putting more miles than average on our car as we started the month in Flagstaff, AZ, headed down to Tempe, AZ and now we’re up in Salt Lake City, UT. We’ll be heading back down to Arizona later this month for a few days before moving northeast to Nebraska, so I’ll predict that we’ll drive 3,000 miles.

Money Spent

Our spending for April was a little different to normal. My parents flew over from the UK and joined us on the road trip for the month, so we shared a lot of expenses – groceries, gas, Airbnbs, etc. In theory, that meant we should have spent less than normal, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

As mentioned earlier, we drove far more than normal – 3,823 miles. That means that even though we split the gas costs, driving double the usual number of miles and higher gas prices meant we spent more on gas than we have done in any other month on the road trip.

We were also very busy throughout the month, going and seeing and doing. Quite a few activities were free because we visited a lot of National Parks and we have an annual National Parks pass. Having said that, we still ended up spending more on activities than normal as we did things like a Lower Antelope Canyon hike that had to be done with a tour guide.

Despite spending most of the month in Airbnbs, we also ate out quite a bit so that we could introduce my parents to various restaurants, so that increased our dining out expenditure.

So, all that said – how did we do with our budget? With a daily budget of $125 and 30 days in April, our budget for the month was $3,750. When checking our spending at the end of the month, we’d spent $3,824.24 which meant we were over budget by $74.24. That wasn’t a terrible result, but it turned out I’d miscalculated.

I input everything on our budget each day, then at the start of the next month Shae reconciles everything and puts together the charts below for this post. When she was going through the budget, she noticed that I’d entered the cost for the Lower Antelope Canyon hike twice on the spreadsheet. That meant our total spending was only $3,694.92, so we were actually $55.08 under budget!

Here’s a breakdown of our spending for April 2022…

…and a chart tracking our spending so far this year:

Looking ahead to our spending for May, I’m hopeful that we’ll manage to stay under budget and hopefully by a couple of hundred bucks. That latter hope will likely depend on how much money we spend while in Salt Lake City for a couple of weeks. There are several breweries I’d like to check out, so hopefully our eating/drinking out expenditure doesn’t end up too high.

Accommodation Cost

We stayed in eight different hotels and Airbnbs last month. Here’s a breakdown of how we paid for them.

April 1-2: Homewood Suites Phoenix Metro Center, AZ. This was the final night of our five night stay there. We booked using Hilton Honors points and, because Hilton offers the 5th night free on award stays to everyone who has status with them, it cost 24,000 points rather than the 30,000 points per night it would’ve cost for a stay shorter than that.

April 2-6: Holiday Inn & Suites Phoenix Airport North, AZ (see this review from a past stay there). This is another stay that we booked using points, only this time it was IHG One Rewards points we redeemed. The first night was 24,000 points and the final three nights were 22,000 points. It didn’t cost us that much though because my IHG Premier credit card offers every 4th night free on award stays, while my IHG Select credit card gives a 10% points rebate on award stays. That reduced our net cost to 15,300 points per night.

April 6-7: Baymont Holbrook, AZ. This was a quick overnight stay on our way from Phoenix to Albuquerque. This only cost $87.94 for the night, so we paid for this stay rather than redeeming points as that wouldn’t have provided good point value.

April 7-14: Hyatt Place Albuquerque Uptown, NM (see this review from a past stay there). This is a category 1 Hyatt property that we booked before peak and off-peak award pricing went live, so it cost 5,000 World of Hyatt points per night.

April 14-20: Airbnb in Monticello, UT (see the listing here). We stayed at this Airbnb to be within driving distance of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks as hotels and Airbnbs in Moab were far more expensive. This two bedroom Airbnb cost $117.11 per night; we paid with Airbnb gift cards bought at a 10% discount and so the net cost was $105.40 per night, or $52.70 per night for our half of the cost.

April 20-21: Super 8 Green River, UT. This was another quick overnight stop on our way down to Kanab via Capitol Reef National Park. It was only a couple of hours from where we’d been staying in Monticello, but I had to work that day which is why we’d arranged a shorter drive. Our room cost $81.95 for the night.

April 21-28: Airbnb in Kanab, UT (see the listing here). We adored this Airbnb – the place was perfect and spacious, while the hosts were incredibly lovely and had all kinds of animals we were able to visit with. This cost $125.19 per night which we paid for with discounted gift cards. That reduced the overall nightly cost to $112.67, which meant our share of the cost was $56.34 per night.

April 28-May 1: Airbnb in Flagstaff, AZ (see the listing here). This was our most expensive accommodation of the month, but that’s because Flagstaff is an expensive place to stay due to its proximity to Sedona and the Grand Canyon. It cost $195.56 per night; again, we paid with Airbnb gift cards bought at a discount which made the nightly cost $176 and therefore made our half of the cost $88 per night.

Hotel Points Earned

Although only two nights in April were hotel stays we paid cash for, we had a healthy boost to some of our hotel points balances. The biggest increase was to our Hilton Honors balances which mainly came about from the 130,000 points I earned as the welcome offer on a new Hilton Business credit card.

Most of the points earnings in other hotel programs were due to putting spend on their credit cards. Here’s a breakdown of everything we earned last month:

• IHG One Rewards – 20,017
• Hilton Honors – 140,148
• Marriott Bonvoy – 6,433
• World of Hyatt – 28,765
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 11,129
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 16,651
• Capital One – 42,940

Hotel Points Redeemed

We didn’t redeem any hotel points in April, so this next breakdown is nice and simple.

• IHG One Rewards – 0
• 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

Based on our earnings in April, here’s how our total balances ended up by the end of the month.

• IHG One Rewards – 544,946
• Hilton Honors – 1,019,864
• Marriott Bonvoy – 243,793
• World of Hyatt – 62,464
• Radisson Rewards – 3,092
• Choice Privileges – 91,569
• Wyndham Rewards – 131,021
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 10
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 688,107
• Capital One – 227,172

Here’s all that data in table format:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

Shae and I had a few changes in the free night certificates we have between us last month. We used some Hilton certificates for a stay in London this summer, while I earned a couple of new Hyatt certificates – one from spending on my World of Hyatt credit card and one from it renewing.

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

Blog Stats

With my parents being with us for the month of April, I didn’t publish many new posts. Thankfully Shae picked up some of the slack and so we still managed to publish a total of 13 new blog posts.

• Number of blog posts published – 13
• Page views – 20,249

RAGBRAI Update

Last month’s training was tough. We were so busy with moving, hiking, sightseeing and more that it was really hard to also fit in safe, long rides. Not to mention the elevation was a huge obstacle as well.

In Phoenix they have a beautiful canal trail that I went on several times, I went out a few times around Monticello, UT and there was a beautiful reservoir for rides in Kanab, UT. In Flagstaff we went to the Grand Canyon and Stephen rented a bike so we did 20 miles together at the Grand Canyon which was a really hard – but really nice – day. I’m behind overall on my mileage for RAGBRAI training, but now that things are going to settle down a bit I’ll be able to refocus on my training routine as we get ever closer to the main event at the end of July!

Final Thoughts

April 2022 was a good month for our road trip stats. We stayed under budget, earned a bunch of hotel points and didn’t redeem any – hopefully it’ll be more of the same for May!