I'm glad it's a piece of cake for you. Is that because your employer pays, or because they're price competitive where you stay the most?

In my area, Choice properties (giving me 4000 points a night seemingly almost nonstop!) are almost always $80ish a night, often even a bit less, while HHonors properties start at $120ish and even anything close to that can be hard to find many nights. And all my stays are on my own dime. I thus find it hard to justify laying out 28 nights at all that extra money when it's kinda doubtful the money I'll save by using Diamond will make up for that...

(And if it weren't Choice, I'd still get way more points or miles per stay than with HHonors AND pay way less per stay at Priority Club properties.)

Oh, and to top it off, in many European locations I've been to so far, either there's no HHonors properties at all -- and not much Diamond Force can do about that! -- or there's cheap Scandics (which with the new higher Scandic redemption rates post-October will often now make more sense to pay for than get award stays at). How you gonna do a Provence or Dordogne or Amalfi coast vacation using HHonors points (except for Paris or Rome at the connection)?