Road Trip Stats: Month 76 – April 2024

We headed into April optimistic about our chances of staying under budget for the month. That’s because most of our accommodation for the month had been booked using points, so there was much less cash outlay in that category compared to normal.

In the end we did stay well under budget, but nowhere near as much as we could have because – surprise, surprise – we ended up spending far more on eating and drinking out than we probably should have. Having said that, we had such a great time, I’m not really sad about that!

Here’s all our road trip stats for 2024.

Miles Driven

We began April with 219,618 miles on our car’s odometer. By the end of the month its reading was 220,676 which means we drove 1,058 miles last month. I’d predicted we’d drive 1,350 miles, so we drove almost 25% fewer miles than that.

Looking ahead to our mileage for May, it’s going to be significantly higher than that. That’s because we started the month in Seattle, moved westwards to Port Angeles and are now heading up into Canada before driving onwards to Alaska. Based on where we’re due to be by May 31, we’re looking at 2,500 miles, not taking into account any side trips we’ll be making in the meantime. I’m therefore going to predict that we’ll drive 3,200 miles, although it could potentially be a little higher than that.

Money Spent

With 30 days in April, our total budget for the month was $3,750; that’s because we have a daily budget for the road trip of $125. By the end of the month we’d spent $3,217.35 which means we stayed under budget by $532.65.

Ordinarily that would be a fantastic result, but truthfully it should have been even better than that. Our accommodation expenditure was only $386.04 which was the 7th lowest amount we’ve spent in that category on the entire road trip. What hurt us was the absurdly high amount of $1,213.03 we spent on eating out and drinking. I mostly blame Spokane for that because they had so many excellent breweries, wineries and cideries; our stay in Leavenworth didn’t help with that either as there were quite a few breweries, wineries and restaurants we visited there too. Still, we had a wonderful time at all of those and so it wasn’t really money wasted.

Here’s a breakdown of our spending…

…and a chart tracking our spending for this year so far.

Looking ahead to May’s spending, I think it’ll be a close-run thing as to whether we stay under budget or not, but most likely we’ll overspend by some amount. Our accommodation expenditure is due to be a little lower than average. However, I imagine our spending on gas as we head up through Canada to Alaska will be much higher; not just due to the mileage itself, but because there’ll be far fewer gas stations which will likely mean gas will cost more.

For the second half of the month we’re not going to be staying anywhere that has a kitchen in our room. That – and the fact that we’ll be spending so much time driving – means we’ll likely be spending more on eating out.

Taking all that into account, I’d be pleased if we manage to stay within $200 of our budgeted amount and would be pleasantly surprised if we managed to actually stay within our budget.

Accommodation Cost

We stayed in six different places during April – here’s where we stayed and how we paid for those stays.

April 1-3: Residence Inn Boise Downtown, ID. We’d begun our stay at this hotel at the end of March, and it finished a couple of days into April. For those final two nights, we used a 35,000 point free night certificate (from a credit card renewal costing ~$100) and a 40,000 point free night certificate (from earning Titanium status last year). The award pricing was 40,000 and 43,000 points respectively, so we had to top up those certificates with a total of 8,000 Marriott Bonvoy points.

April 3-4: Super 8 McCall, ID. After Boise, we drove up to Coeur d’Alene for a week. We’d both had to work the day of April 3 (the day we checked out of Boise), so driving the 7 hours to Coeur d’Alene wasn’t really doable, especially because I had a work meeting in the evening. We therefore booked a quick overnight stay along the route in McCall; that cost $111.32 including tax.

April 4-11: MainStay Suites Coeur d’Alene, ID. We booked this stay using 12,000 Choice Privileges points per night.

April 11-21: The Historic Davenport in Spokane, WA (check out my review here). This hotel is part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection brand and we booked it with points. Marriott Bonvoy uses dynamic pricing for award nights which means the points price can vary from night to night. For our stay it ranged from 21,000-40,000 points per night.

Marriott has a ‘Stay 5, Pay For 4’ feature which, seeing as we stayed 10 nights, meant we got two of those nights free. We ended up having to redeem a total of 244,000 points for our stay, or an average of 24,400 Marriott Bonvoy points per night.

April 21-26: Hampton Inn Leavenworth, WA (review to come in the next couple of weeks). This stay was booked with Hilton Honors points. Hilton uses dynamic pricing too for award nights, although they were charging 41,000 points for each night we were there. Hilton offers every 5th night free on award stays if you have Silver status or above, so one of those nights we got free. That made our total outlay 164,000 points, or an average of 32,800 Hilton Honors points per night.

April 26-May 1: Hyatt Regency Seattle, WA (see our review of this property from a few years ago). This was booked using World of Hyatt points; four of those nights cost 15,000 points per night, while the other cost 12,000 points.

Hotel Points Earned

We earned a decent number of hotel points in April, but it’s not necessarily as impressive as it looks. Most of the increase in Chase Ultimate Rewards was from a credit card referral, while most of the Marriott points increase was due to a cancelled award stay rather than them being newly earned points.

Most of the Hilton points were the result of a cancelled award stay and credit card spend, while a fair number of the IHG points earned were rebated points from past award stays (if you have the old IHG Select credit card, you get 10% of points redeemed for award stays rebated).

• IHG One Rewards – 32,948
• Hilton Honors – 535,500
• Marriott Bonvoy – 244,517
• World of Hyatt – 464
• Choice Privileges – 100
• Wyndham Rewards – 32,250
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 56,223
• Capital One – 390
• Citi ThankYou – 713

Hotel Points Redeemed

Most of the Marriott points that got added back to my account ended up getting redeemed almost immediately for a different upcoming award stay. We also booked a stay with IHG and another with Wyndham, as well as a couple of stays with Hilton for later this summer which accounts for the other redemptions listed below.

• IHG One Rewards – 75,600
• Hilton Honors – 440,000
• Marriott Bonvoy – 274,500
• World of Hyatt – 0
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 67,500
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0
• Capital One – 0
• Citi ThankYou – 0

Total Hotel Points Balances

Based on all those changes, here’s how our total hotel points balances looked at the end of April 2024:

• IHG One Rewards – 280,140
• Hilton Honors – 153,398
• Marriott Bonvoy – 426,347
• World of Hyatt – 107,617
• Choice Privileges – 135,951
• Wyndham Rewards – 115,118
• Hotels.com OneKey – $19.26
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 535,192
• Capital One – 264,502
• Citi ThankYou – 65,604

Here’s all that information in table format:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

We earned another couple of Hilton free night certificates last month – one from spend on a Hilton credit card and another from the renewal of one of our Hilton Aspire credit cards. We then redeemed five of them for our 20th anniversary trip to the Maldives this summer.

The other change is that we earned another Hyatt free night certificate after earning 30 elite night credits this year.

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

Blog Stats

We were so busy enjoying ourselves in Washington state for much of the month that we only got nine new blog posts published in April.

• Number of blog posts published – 9
• Page views – 10,699

Final Thoughts

It was a decent month for our road trip stats in April, particularly seeing as we stayed more than $500 under budget – a rarity over the last ~7 years of our road trip. Hopefully we can be disciplined during May to continue that under budget trend, but I’m not overly optimistic that that’ll happen.