What time of year? Phoenix outside of winter can have extremelly cheap hotel rates, making redemption a poor value then.
I am picky about the hotel.. 1ST WEEK IN JANUARY
This no-annual-fee card:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...nors-visa.html
can be churned repeatedly (as often as every 2.5 or 3 monhts if you can do the $1500 spend that fast). Between now and "next year" you should have time to get it several times over, and thus well over 100k HHonors points.
That's good to know!
(But if the room rates with money are low in Phoenix at the time you're going, HHonors points would likely be an especially poor value. Perhaps use them for Hawaii itself?