Another month, another case of us going over budget!
In our road trip stats for May, when looking ahead to our spending for June I’d said that I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up going a couple of hundred bucks over budget. That’s because we were spending the month in Alaska, so between activities and higher general costs of living, staying within a $125 per day budget would be hard.
We ended up overspending by more than that, but considering how dire our budget was looking a couple of weeks into the month, it didn’t end up being a terrible result.
Here’s all our road trip stats for June 2024.
Miles Driven
The month began with our car’s odometer reading at 223,730. We ended June with 225,499 miles on the clock which means we drove 1,769 miles. I’d predicted we’d drive 1,450 miles, so that ended up being quite a bit more than I’d anticipated.
We’ll be driving significantly more miles than that in July. We’re leaving Seward, AK today to start our drive back up through Alaska and back down through Canada to Seattle. We’re stopping in a bunch of places along as it’s such a long drive and, with a couple of mini side trips too, I’m going to predict that we’ll drive 3,100 miles in July.
Money Spent
In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at quite how far over budget we ended up. As mentioned earlier, we’re doing our 50 state road trip on a budget of $125 per day which has to include everything – accommodation, food, gas, activities, etc. Considering how expensive Alaska is – even sticking to $125 per day on accommodation could be a struggle for most people if you’re not camping – the fact that we went over budget isn’t something to feel too down about.
Ultimately, it didn’t end up as bad as I thought it might. We’d already hit our budget limit for the entire month by something like June 11 or 12, so thankfully we did manage to somewhat contain our spending the rest of the month. With that $125 budget, we had $3,750 to spend for the month and ended up spending $4,304.73 – that’s $554.73 over budget.
Food and drink was a particularly large component of our spending in June. That’s often the case, but between several breweries we wanted to check out and much more expensive groceries in Alaska, that made up a large chunk of the overspend.
Accommodation costs played a part in the overspend too. Although 2.5 weeks of the month were spent in hotels we booked using points, the rest of our stays were either in Airbnbs or an independent hotel. Three nights were particularly expensive, costing more than $200 per night, due to the nature of their location (more about that in a later section).
Here’s a breakdown of our spending for June…
…and a chart tracking our (mostly) overspending this year so far.
Looking ahead to our spending for July, we’re going to do something a little different with our stats. Once we get down to Seattle, we’ll be there for a few days before pausing our road trip for a month. Shae and I are celebrating our 20th anniversary in the Maldives in early August and before that we’re planning on flying to the Finger Lakes region in New York.
The Finger Lakes is one of the five locations we’re seriously considering settling in for at least a few years after the road trip finishes at the end of 2024. We spent a couple of weeks there in the summer last year and love it. We wanted to return now though as we have a bit of time to kill before the Maldives and wanted to check out some of the towns and cities there to get a better idea of what it might be like to live in one of them.
That means we’ll be pausing our road trip in mid-July and will start back up in mid-August. What we’re therefore going to do is a July/August combo for the next edition of our road trip stats, a little like we’ve done a couple of times in the past when traveling overseas. It’s therefore hard for me to make any predictions as to how much well spend across those two half months. It wouldn’t surprise me if we go a little over budget, simply because the cost of gas driving back from Alaska will be high, as will the cost of groceries, eating out, etc. We’ll then be in Montana for the last couple of weeks in August and I’ve no idea what the cost of living is there.
Accommodation Cost
We stayed in seven different hotels and Airbnbs in Alaska in the month of June – here’s how we paid for them.
June 1-2: Airbnb in Tok, AK (see my review here). We booked this through Airbnb where it cost only $51.35 – fantastic value! We paid for it using Airbnb gift cards we’d bought at a discount, so our net cost was $43.65.
June 2-8: Hyatt Place Fairbanks, AK (see a brief review of it here). At the time of our stay in June 2024, this hotel was a category 4 property in the World of Hyatt program which means it costs 12,000, 15,000 or 18,000 points per night depending on if it’s at off-peak, standard or peak pricing respectively. It was at standard pricing (i.e. 15k points) for five nights and off-peak (i.e. 12k) for one night of our stay.
June 8-10: Airbnb in Healy, AK (this one). We stayed here for two nights to visit nearby Denali National Park. It was a great tiny home/cabin, but also very expensive given its location. Our two nights cost $255.63 per night, with our net cost only being $217.28 per night due to paying with discounted Airbnb gift cards.
June 10-17: Airbnb in Wasilla, AK (this one). We started looking at our Alaska accommodation options a year ahead of time to give us the best chance of finding award availability when booking with points and lower costs when paying cash. We booked this Airbnb in Wasilla back in July 2023, so 11 months before our stay, as it was near several places we wanted to visit and only cost $80.40 per night – a bargain for a one bedroom house all to yourself in Alaska. By paying with discounted Airbnb gift cards, our net cost was $68.34 per night.
June 17-29: Hyatt House Anchorage, AK (see our review here). Similar to the Hyatt Place Fairbanks, the Hyatt House Anchorage was a category 4 property and so costs 12,000, 15,000 or 18,000 points per night depending on if it’s at off-peak, standard or peak pricing respectively. It was at standard pricing throughout our stay, so we redeemed 15,000 World of Hyatt points per night.
June 27-28: King Eider Inn in Utqiagvik, AK (see our review here). Towards the end of our time in Anchorage we made a quick trip up to Utqiagvik. This city is the northernmost city in the US and is very remote, so there aren’t many accommodation options there. That bumps up the price of hotels and Airbnbs, so this stay cost us $220.50 for the night.
June 29-July 1: Airbnb in Seward, AK (this one). This cost $121.45 per night, with us reducing the cost to $109.31 per night, by paying with – yep, you guessed it! – Airbnb gift cards we bought at a discount.
Hotel Points Earned
June was a much quieter month for us when it came to earning hotel points. The only big increase was with Wyndham and that was primarily due to a cancelled award stay.
- IHG One Rewards – 826
- Hilton Honors – 700
- Marriott Bonvoy – 241
- World of Hyatt – 6,772
- Choice Privileges – 100
- Wyndham Rewards – 91,661
- Hotels.com OneKey – $0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 6,809
- Capital One – 1,181
- Citi ThankYou – 3,715
Hotel Points Redeemed
It wasn’t a particularly busy month for redeeming points either, although we did book a couple of award stays with Marriott and another with Choice.
- IHG One Rewards – 0
- Hilton Honors – 0
- Marriott Bonvoy – 198,500
- World of Hyatt – 0
- Choice Privileges – 120,000
- Wyndham Rewards – 0
- Hotels.com OneKey – $0
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 0 (we did transfer 51,000 Ultimate Rewards to Hyatt to book an award stay for a friend, but didn’t account for that in these stats as it wasn’t road trip-related and they’ll be paying us back).
- Capital One – 0
- Citi ThankYou – 0
Total Hotel Points Balances
Based on those changes, here’s how our points balances ended up at the end of June.
- IHG One Rewards – 291,531
- Hilton Honors – 297,912
- Marriott Bonvoy – 227,126
- World of Hyatt – 84,600
- Choice Privileges – 16,051
- Wyndham Rewards – 104,328
- Hotels.com OneKey – $19.26
- Chase Ultimate Rewards – 418,811
- Capital One – 267,371
- Citi ThankYou – 70,495
Here’s all that information in a table:
Hotel Free Night Certificates
We had quite a few changes to the number of hotel free night certificates we have on our accounts last month. We got another IHG certificate from the renewal of a credit card, three Marriott certificates from renewing credit cards, we redeemed one Hyatt category 1-4 certificate and earned a Hyatt category 1-7 certificate when earning Globalist status again this year (reached when getting 60 elite night credits).
- IHG (up to 40,000 points per night) – 1
- Hilton (any property worldwide) – 1
- Marriott (up to 35,000 points per night) – 3
- Marriott (up to 40,000 points per night) – 0
- Hyatt (category 1-4) – 2
- Hyatt (category 1-7) – 1
Blog Stats
It was another regular kind of month when it comes to our blog stats too; just shy of 9,000 page views and another ten posts published.
- Number of blog posts published – 10
- Page views – 8,854
Final Thoughts
June was another month that wasn’t great when it came to our budget, but only going ~$550 over our regular budget when spending the entire month in expensive Alaska still sort of counts as a win if you squint reaaaaaally hard.
Thoughts on increasing the budget by $5-$10 a day? If you only hit it two out of six months, it might not be a realistic budget.
I had wondered that too. In hindsight, we probably should’ve done that, although I’m hoping we might be able to do better in the last few months of the year. My optimism might be severely misplaced though!
I think you did fantastic with your budget considering you were in Alaska and how expensive it is there!
Thanks!