I've been pricing some rooms for travel to Italy and Spain and have found the hotels to be a pretty decent deal. They are running at about $0.015 per mile or in one example, 33,000 miles for three nights at a place in Rome that would go for $170/nt. One nice thing over say Hilton or SPG is that there are a lot of smaller, more centrally located hotels. And it can be cheaper than using hotel points. Ex: Madrid Hilton is 30,000 HH points but can be had for 11,000 AA miles. I'm not sure how status works with using AA vs HH though.

Also, check out staying longer as some hotels have buy 2 stay 3 or 3 and 4.