Road Trip Stats: Month 77 – May 2024

When I’m wrong, I can be really wrong!

In our last road trip stats post for April, I’d said the following about our spending for May:

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.

I therefore had some slight hope that we’d stay within budget, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. We sadly once again went waaaaay over budget.

Here’s all our road trip stats for May 2024 – the 77th month of our 50 state road trip.

Miles Driven

We knew that we’d be driving more miles than normal in May because we were driving from the US up through Canada towards Alaska. We started the month with 220,676 miles on our car and ended it with its odometer reading at 223,730. That means we drove 3,054 miles in May – our farthest distance in quite a while from what I can remember.

I’d predicted that we’d drive 3,200 miles, so I wasn’t too far off with that guess.

Looking ahead to our mileage for June, we’re going to be adding far less mileage than that to our car by the end of the month. We’re spending the entire month in Alaska which is a massive state. However, all the places we’re driving to will be in the southeast quarter of the state, so that’ll minimize how much we’ll have to drive. I’m therefore going to guess that we’ll drive 1,450 miles in June, but it could conceivably be more or less than that.

Money Spent

This is where it gets ugly. Our road trip budget is $125 per day which has to cover everything – gas, accommodation, food, drink, activities, etc. May had 31 days, so our total budget for the month was $3,875. By the end of the month we’d spent $4,642.76 which means we went over budget by $767.76 – ouch!

There are a few reasons that happened. A key one is gas expenditure. Not only did we drive more miles than normal, but driving through Canada meant the cost of gas was more expensive in the US. As a result, we spent almost $500 on gas in May – more than we’ve spent on gas in a single month at any other point on our road trip.

Another key pain point was hotel pet fees. Those amounted to almost $500 as well which is far higher than normal. Our spending on activities was also the 6th highest it’s been in any single month. I’d expected both our eating out and groceries spending to be extremely high too. While it was higher than we might’ve liked, it was surprisingly less overall than it had been in the previous few months.

Here’s a breakdown of our spending for May…

…and a chart tracking our overall spending for the year.

Looking ahead to June’s budget, this is a hard one to call. Being in Alaska isn’t cheap from a cost of living perspective, plus we’ll have activities to do that won’t be cheap. As things stand, there’s a slight chance that we’ll manage to stay within budget, but I suspect that won’t happen. Like I said in last month’s stats post, I won’t be surprised if we go a couple of hundred bucks over budget; hopefully that’ll be the limit this time though, rather than us going almost $800 over!

Accommodation Cost

May was a busy month for moving around, with us staying in ten different places. Here’s a breakdown for how we booked them:

May 1-2: Hyatt Regency Seattle, WA (see our review of this property from a few years ago). This was booked using 15,000 World of Hyatt points.

May 2-9: Vacasa rental property in Port Angeles, WA (see more about it here). Vacasa has a partnership with Wyndham, so this only cost us 13,500 Wyndham points per night. Standard pricing was 15,000 points per night, but we get a 10% discount for having a Wyndham Rewards Earner Business credit card. The pricing setup has changed since we booked that though, so nowadays it’d more likely cost 30,000 points per night (or 27,000 points with the 10% discount).

May 9-10: Avid in Wenatchee, WA. Avid is one of IHG’s brands and we booked using their points. They offered a 15% discount on award nights in April for cardholders and those with Platinum status or higher, so I rebooked our stay to take advantage of that. It cost 13,600 points, but we get an additional 10% back from having an IHG Select credit card which is no longer available for new applications. That means our net cost was 12,240 IHG One Rewards points.

May 10-16: Spirit Ridge Resort in Osoyoos, Canada (see my review here). We used a category 1-4 free night certificate for the first night, 15,000 World of Hyatt points for the second night and 12,000 points per night for the remaining four nights.

May 16-20: Holiday Inn Kamloops, Canada. We booked this using IHG points and they use dynamic pricing which means the cost varies from night to night when using points. The first night was 18,000 points, second was 30,000, third was 19,000 and the fourth was 18,000. IHG gives every 4th night free on award stays if you have the IHG Premier, Traveler or Business card, plus I get a 10% points rebate from my IHG Select credit card. That meant our net cost was 15,075 IHG One Rewards points per night.

May 20-23: Hyatt Place Prince George, Canada. We redeemed 5,000 World of Hyatt points per night for the first two nights and 6,500 points for the third night.

May 23-24: Bulkley Valley Hotel in Hazelton, Canada. We booked this using Booking.com and it cost $98.84.

May 24-25: Airbnb in Jade City (this one). This cost $119.62 for the night, but we paid with Airbnb gift cards we bought at a discount which meant the net cost was $101.68.

May 25-30: The 98 Hotel in Whitehorse, Canada. This cost $91.50 per night.

May 30-June 1: The Downtown Hotel in Dawson City, Canada. This cost $113.24 per night.

Hotel Points Earned

We had two hotel programs that had a significant number of points being added to them in May – Hilton and Hyatt. However, it’s not as exciting as it looks. Most of the Hyatt points earnings came about as a result of a cancelled award stay, while the Hilton increase was mostly from transferring in some Amex Membership Rewards points to take advantage of a transfer bonus.

Here’s a breakdown of everything we earned.

• IHG One Rewards – 10,565
• Hilton Honors – 294,426
• Marriott Bonvoy – 1,038
• World of Hyatt – 270,711
• Choice Privileges – 100
• Wyndham Rewards – 5,549
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 7,810
• Capital One – 1,688
• Citi ThankYou – 1,176

Hotel Points Redeemed

We redeemed quite a few points in May too. We booked a couple of Hyatt stays, a Hilton stay and redeemed Wyndham points twice – once for a Wyndham stay and once for a Vacasa rental.

• IHG One Rewards – 0
• Hilton Honors – 150,612
• Marriott Bonvoy – 2,000
• World of Hyatt – 300,500
• Choice Privileges – 0
• Wyndham Rewards – 108,000
• Hotels.com OneKey – $0
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 80,000
• Capital One – 0
• Citi ThankYou – 0

Total Hotel Points Balances

Based on all those changes, here’s where our points balances ended up by the end of May:

• IHG One Rewards – 290,705
• Hilton Honors – 297,212
• Marriott Bonvoy – 425,385
• World of Hyatt – 77,828
• Choice Privileges – 135,951
• Wyndham Rewards – 12,667
• Hotels.com OneKey – $19.26
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 463,002
• Capital One – 266,190
• Citi ThankYou – 66,780

Here’s all that information in table format:

Hotel Free Night Certificates

We had a few changes to our collection of hotel free night certificates last month. We redeemed an IHG certificate for a stay next month, redeemed a Marriott one for the month after and earned two more Hyatt certs from our Hyatt credit cards renewing.

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

Blog Stats

Despite spending so much time in the car last month, we still managed to get ten posts published.

• Number of blog posts published – 10
• Page views – 8,532

Final Thoughts

May wasn’t a great month for our stats, particularly when it came to our budget. Fingers crossed that we manage to limit our overspend in June.