Road Trip Stats: Month 58 – October 2022

After taking August and September off from the road trip to head overseas and do a few other things domestically, October saw us get back on the road, heading up to Pennsylvania.

It ended up being a strangely expensive month. It didn’t feel like we splurged in any particular area, but cumulatively we spent far more than we’d anticipated which was a little disappointing.

Here’s our stats for October 2022 where we share more about that overspend, how far we drove, our hotel points activity and more.

Miles Driven

We began the month with 187,504 miles on our car, while by the end of the month its odometer reading was 188,998. That means we drove 1,494 miles in October. I’d predicted in last month’s stats post that we’d drive 1,400 miles, so I was fairly close with that guess for once.

It’s hard to know how many miles we’ll drive in November. We moved from Philadelphia to Delaware a few days ago, then we’ll be heading across to Sterling, VA which is just outside of Washington D.C. Those areas aren’t too far from each other, but we will be taking some day trips here and there to get to activities, so I’ll predict that we’ll drive 1,250 miles in November.

Money Spent

October had 31 days in it so, with a budget of $125 per day, we had a total budget for the month of $3,875. By the end of the month we’d spent $4,490.13 which means we went $615.13 over budget.

As mentioned earlier, there wasn’t really a key reason we went so far over budget – we just spent a little more in several categories than normal. Our accommodation, activities and grocery spending in particular were all a little higher than normal, so those combined led to the overspend.

Here’s a breakdown of our spending from last month…

…along with a chart showing our spending over the course of the year so far.

Looking ahead to our spending for November, I’m more optimistic than I was a few days ago. For some reason I thought that our accommodation spending was higher this month than it actually will be, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to stay under budget. We still have a long way to get back under budget for the year though; we overspent by $821.53 in the first 10 months of the year, so that’s a large amount to have to overturn with only two months left of 2022.

Accommodation Cost

We only stayed in five different places in October, so this section will be a little shorter than normal.

October 1-2: Portsmouth, VA. We were staying with Shae’s mom and stepdad, so this night was free.

October 2-7: Hyatt Centric Center City Philadelphia, PA. We booked this five night stay using five free night certificates, so in theory the stay was completely free. However, a couple of those certificates would’ve come from renewing our Hyatt credit cards, so effectively we paid two sets of $95 annual fees.

October 7-14: Hyatt House Philadelphia/Plymouth Meeting, PA. Shae and I knew we’d want longer in the Philadelphia area, but staying at the Hyatt Centric for another week would’ve cost a lot of points as we were out of free night certificates. As a result we booked a stay at the Hyatt House in Plymouth Meeting which was 30-45 minutes outside of Philadelphia. That was a category 1 property at standard pricing during our stay, so we redeemed 5,000 World of Hyatt points per night. That was good value as the cash rate would’ve been ~$145 per night.

October 14-28: Airbnb in Pittsburgh, PA. This Airbnb was actually in Monroeville – a suburb of Pittsburgh – and we picked it as it looked like a lovely place to be settled for a couple of weeks, plus it had a yard for Truffles to run around in (albeit not fenced in). It ended up being even nicer than we’d anticipated, so we were sad to leave it after a couple of weeks.

It cost $142.15 per night, but we were able to reduce that to $127.94 per night by paying with Airbnb gift cards we bought at a discount.

October 28-November 1: Homewood Suites Mechanicsburg, PA. We booked this stay using Hilton Honors points. We stayed there 10 nights and Hilton gives every 5th night free on award stays for anyone with status. The redemption rate was 34,000 points per night, but getting the 5th and 10th nights free meant our net cost was 27,200 Hilton Honors points per night.

Hotel Points Earned

We increased our balances on a few hotel programs in October, but there weren’t really any significant increases. Some of the points increases came as a result of Milestone Rewards from Hyatt and Hilton, some of the IHG increase was a result of the 10% points rebate on award stays thanks to our IHG Select credit cards, while the rest of the increases were mostly from spending on credit cards.

• IHG One Rewards – 30,084
• Hilton Honors – 15,212
• Marriott Bonvoy – 161
• World of Hyatt – 29,378
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 921
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 26,334
• Capital One – 0

Hotel Points Redeemed

In October we sat down and worked out where we’ll be going on the road trip in 2023. Some of those places can get expensive at the times of the year we’ll be visiting them, so we wanted to get accommodation booked ASAP. That’s why we redeemed large chunks of our Hilton and Marriott points balances. We also redeemed a ton of IHG points for a month-long stay at the end of this year.

• IHG One Rewards – 380,000
• Hilton Honors – 240,000
• Marriott Bonvoy – 128,000
• World of Hyatt – 17,500
• Radisson Rewards – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 0
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 7,000
• Capital One – 0

Total Hotel Points Balances

Based on those earnings and redemptions, here’s how our hotel points balances ended by the end of October.

• IHG One Rewards – 626,558
• Hilton Honors – 806,923
• Marriott Bonvoy – 99,662
• World of Hyatt – 35,546
• Radisson Rewards – 73,092
• Choice Privileges – 96,665
• Wyndham Rewards – 44,646
• Hotels.com Rewards Credits – 2
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 794,415
• Capital One – 296,572

Here’s that information in table format:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

We added a couple of free night certificates in October. One was for IHG and another was for Marriott; both of them were certificates received when renewing their credit cards.

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

Blog Stats

We’ve been publishing fewer blog posts the last few months. Part of that has been due to how busy we’ve been, but it’s also because the posts we’ve been publishing have been more comprehensive and/or lengthy, so it’s taken much longer than normal to put them together. That meant we only published five new posts last month.

• Number of blog posts published – 5
• Page views – 21,834

Final Thoughts

Our budget took a big hit in October which pushed us even further over budget for the year. It would be nice to make up that overspend by the end of the year, but I’m not holding my breath!