Lodging Log

I keep track of everywhere I’ve spent the night in a lodging log on my local computer.

This originally started as tracking my hotel stays in a spreadsheet. I started including stays with friends and family as well, and eventually included every home I’ve ever lived in. With this data, for any given night in my life, I can determine where I spent the night.¹

Each stay location and home includes geographic coordinates and the cities and metro areas, so I can create maps of where I’ve stayed, or calculate my distance from home on any given night.

Technical Details

GitHub: bogardpd / lodging_data_utils

My lodging log is stored in multiple layers of a single GeoPackage file, as described in Lodging Data Structure. I edit the data using QGIS.

I wrote a lodging_data_utils Python repository, with a number of scripts for compiling data from the lodging log. I use this data to create charts and maps, such as for my Year in Travel posts.

Version History

Using Lodging Log Data

Having this lodging log data has allowed me to create a lot of travel stats. Here are a few pages where I used my lodging log data:

• Distance From Home by Day
  After noticing I was often on distant trips in mid-February, I charted which days of the year I was furthest from home on average.

• Nights Away and Home
  When I had to pause some travel in 2020, I made a graphic showing my longest consecutive stretches traveling or at home.

• Lifetime Hilton Diamond
  When I spent my 1000th night with Hilton and earned lifetime status, I wrote up a lot of statistics about my Hilton stays.