First, welcome to FT.
The Travel Package (TP) hotel e-cert is the same as any other Marriott hotel award cert. So if there is a award room availability, the TP hotel cert can be used. Note that you have to use the whole e-cert for your stay. That means it has to be used in one hotel for one stay.
The award is usable at any Marriott hotel world-wide as long as you have the correct category (i.e. a Cat. 7 won't work at a Cat. 9 hotel, etc.)
Your plan sounds like it will work. The biggest issue is making sure the hotel you want to use the award at has award availability for your desired nights. Note that with Marriott you can make an award reservation before you have the points needed for that award. So if you know where you want to go now, you can make the award reservation and then order the TP award later.
The only other thing I might think about is how you would get to Europe? Marriott's TP awards can get you airline points in most any of the world's major carriers. So you might want to decide if you might get more benefit from getting airline miles from a different airline.
Originally Posted by
feckman
First, are there any restrictions on when you have to use the vacation package nights?
Second, are they even good in Europe?
Third, we've got about 325,000 UR points between us, so we're seriously considering going big and buying another 50K Marriott points so we can get the Category 9 + 100K Rapid Rewards package for 370K Marriott points. This way we have an additional 50K Rapid Reward points for family travel in 2014 and can stay at the Paris Marriott Hotel Champs-Elysees or Renaissance Paris Vendome Hotel while we're in France. Is this a reasonable plan (assuming the answers to 1 and 2 are yes)?
Fourth, (and probably most importantly) are there any potential pitfalls or grossly underestimated opportunity costs I'm missing with this plan?