Wow, has travel dropped down

Every year near the end of the year I take a look at my travel stats for the year. I don't anticipate another trip this year, so I can wrap up the numbers. I now have stats on the last 11 years, going back to 2007. The first 7 years and last 4 years look quite different. From 2007 through 2013, I averaged flying 51,166 miles per year and spending 24.3% of the nights (including weekends) away from home. I averaged 25.8% of business nights (nights before working the next day) away from home.

Starting in 2014, things changed drastically. Over the last 4 years, I have averaged 7,055 flight miles per year, 8.1% of total nights away from home and only 3.1% of business nights away from home. I've averaged 7 nights per year staying in a hotel room on business trips.

This year I had 2 personal airline trips and 2 business airline trips. The number of vacations really hasn't changed over the course of my travels - I averaged 21.2 nights away from home on personal vacations from 2007 through 2013, and 22.8 nights away from home on personal vacations from 2014 through 2017. ("Personal vacations" includes trips to the in-laws where we spent the night, a weekend camping trip, and so on - so it's not like I'm going on multiple cruises a year or something).

The only thing I miss about not going on many business trips per year is the accumulation of airline and hotel points. Since I still have about the same number of personal trips each year, it was nice when I was able to use my airline points for free flights and my hotel points for free nights. Now it takes several years to build up enough for anything free.

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