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We have a 2000 Odyssey that my wife typically drives and since she doesn't record her fillups I have a hard time tracking it's actual mileage. All I know is that it got about 19 two fills ago, and about 6 months ago it was doing between 17-18.5 when I filled it. I gave her a hard time about doing worse in it than I do in my truck so I think she started paying attention to how she drives.
Our particular van has a strange accelerator that is very stiff and requires high initial force to depress, often leading to greater than intended initial acceleration. This is hard to get used to and kills fuel economy since it tries to keep 1st past 3500 rpm. I think this is peculiar to our van as neither my parents' 99 or their 2003(4? last of the previous style) do this. I attribute it to my grandfather's inner-city driving style of PWM accelerating to maintain an average speed just wearing out the accelerator bushings (van was my grandparent's since new, I inherited it).
Gotta keep the engine at or below 2k rpms. This is hard since the torque converter seems to stall around 1800 or so. Keeping it below 2500 helps but if you can be extra-gentle the lower the better. Try to make sure that you stay out of the hill control mode or whatever Honda calls it where they engine-brake to control descent speed. Tapping the gas momentarily on downhills cancels it and lets the van coast. These vans coast pretty well if the ECU lets it. Oh, and remove your roof rack cross bars. I don't even know where mine are since my dad removed them when the van was new and they weren't in the van when I took possession of it.
I don't know about the A/C loading. We keep ours on full auto thermostat control. In the summer the rear A/C is usually manually set to low, sometimes pumped up when it's extra hot to cool it down quicker and then backed down. It's got a pretty large greenhouse and interior air volume to even think about dealing with minimal A/C in the hot months.
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