(Belated) 2024 Fully Wrapped: Travel Year in Review
Okay, so we’re slightly late on our 2024 Travel Wrapped (thank you, Spotify, for the inspiration). But hey, better late than never, right? Here’s a peek into our year, a few months after everyone else did theirs! Hello 2025!
There’s a fascination to knowing how others spent their year, or at least we all like to think so. There’s a reason we all choose to share our Spotify wrapped on social media.
So without further ado, here’s our 2024 Wrapped: Travel Year in Review!
Travel Year in Review: Flight Distance
On a total of 18 flights, we flew over 32,000 miles. The longest distance being Chicago (ORD) to Zurich (ZRH) and back again, at 4,443 miles. This slightly edged out the route between Chicago (ORD) to Honolulu (HNL) at 4,243 miles.
The shortest flight we took was from Honolulu (HNL) to Lihue (LIH) at 102 miles.
Travel Year in Review: One new country
In 2024, we visited Zurich, Switzerland over Labor Day weekend. Neither of us had ever been to Switzerland, and we had a wonderful time. Highly recommend adding Zurich to your list if you haven’t been yet. Thanks to points and miles, we were able to cover our whole hotel stay and flights to & from Zurich.
Travel Year in Review: Airport Lounges
Prior to investing in our travel hacking journey, visiting airport lounges was not a regular part of our travel. Now, thanks to P2’s United Club Infinite Card, we’re able to go to lounges quite frequently. No surprise here, the airline lounge we visited most often was a United Club lounge.
At O’Hare International Airport (ORD), our home airport, we visited the United Clubs in Terminal B, Terminal C, and Terminal F together. In Denver, we visited their new United Club in Terminal B. The United Club Infinite Card also helped us access lounges in Orange County (SNA), Seattle (SEA), Raleigh-Durham (RDU), Honolulu (HNL), and Los Angeles (LAX).
The one lounge we visited that was not a United Club was the Swiss Airlines Lounge in Zurich. We flew United Premium Plus home from Zurich, and thanks to our United Gold Premier Status, we were able to access the Swiss Airlines Lounge at Zurich International Airport (ZRH).
Travel Year in Review: Hotel Stays
We spent 39 nights in hotels in 2024. The longest stays were five nights each in Zurich and Koloa. The shortest was one night in Los Angeles on our way back from Kauai. Every hotel stay except for one was with Marriott. The one that wasn’t was the Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort & Spa in Koloa, Hawaii. We are typically loyal to Marriott, but the value of Hyatt points was impossible to beat on Kauai. For our stay at the Grand Hyatt, we used 30,000 points per night to cover our five-night stay. The Grand Hyatt Kauai was well worth the deviation from our usual Marriott – if you’re planning a visit to Kauai, check out this hotel.
Marriott brands that we stayed at this year included:
- Westin
- Renaissance
- Courtyard
- JW Marriott
- Marriott
- Sheraton
Travel Year in Review: States and Cities
We didn’t visit any states that we hadn’t visited before in 2024, but we were still able to visit eleven different states. In addition, we visited twenty-one different cites, all of which were domestic except for Zurich, Switzerland.
Travel Year in Review: National Parks
One of our travel goals is to visit all sixty-three national parks. In 2024, we crossed four more off our list – Petrified Forest National Park, Olympic National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Mammoth Cave National Park. We are now at twenty-four of sixty-three – only thirty-nine more to go!
- America the Beautiful Pass
- One Day at Petrified Forest National Park
- Three National Parks in Three Days
- What to do at Congaree National Park
- Things to do at New River Gorge National Park
- Things to do at Channel Islands National Park
Conclusion
Whether it was crossing an ocean to Zurich or ticking off more national parks, each trip brought its own set of memories that will last far beyond the return flight. Of course, the journey doesn’t end here—2025 already has a few adventures in the works, and we can’t wait to see where the next year takes us. Thanks for following along on our travels, and here’s to another year of exploring the world, one destination at a time!
