For the past couple of years, a lot of my rewards earning activity has been concentrated on hotel points. You fly for a couple of hours, but you may spend days in one or more hotels. The opportunities for cost savings are obvious.

Up until recently, I have been concentrating on what may be called destination hotels - think of the Hilton Cavalieri in Rome, or the Marriott County Hall in London and so on. A destination hotel is a property that is worth staying at in its own right, for the comfort and luxury and, if you're an elite, the perks that go along with it.

However, there are at least two other travelling modes -- the "save as much money as possible because we don't have much" mode, and the "touring around and stopping here and there" mode. Both modes, in my opinion, are perfectly valid. Indeed, the money angle could be the major factor in keeping a lot of folks from travelling, and the touring mode is something I've done a little of, but wish I could do more. It's a great way to get the feel of a region/country.

My main interest in award travel is travel to Europe. I believe a lot of us share the same interest.

Besides spending a lot of time and effort with the Hilton and Marriott programs, circumstances last year dictated that I find another chain for at least part of my stays. For a number of reasons, I settled on the Choice hotel chain. This includes the Clarion Hotels, Comfort Inns, Quality Inns, and Sleep Inns, along with a couple of other minor players.

The Choice chain is a mid-level chain, approximately on a par with Fairfield Inns, Hampton Inns, Days Inns, Baymont Inns, and so on. However, Choice has a number of advantages (to me):

1. They are everywhere. Nearly 3000 properties world wide and, for the project at hand, nearly 500 properties in Europe.

2. The Choice frequent stayer program (Guest Privileges) provides tremendous opportunities to really score some major points. In their last promotion alone (June - August) I was able to rack up nearly a quarter million points!

3. For everyday use, at least in the US, they tend to be reasonably priced and usually more than adequate.

Having said all this, with my stash of points and faced with a bewildering array of possible choices for our next trip to Europe, I decided it would be a good thing to create a useful tool to help sort through all this information.

The task was not made easier by the following stark realization -- the quality of the properties in Europe varies much more widely than I have found in the US. Indeed, it is not unusual to find traveller's reviews ranging from "total dump - avoid like the plague" to "an absolute gem -- will definitely return".

So --- here's the deal.

I have created a multi-page spreadsheet that lists all the Choice properties in Europe. They are divided into countries (each country has its own page) with some subdivisions (UK, for example, has separate pages for N. Ireland, Scotland. Wales, London, and England outside of London).

Each entry contains:

1. The name of the property, clickable to the hotel home page.
2. The town it's located in
3. The points required for a night's stay
4. A link to the review of the property on Tripadvisor

Having gone through the agony of trying to choose a hotel and searching back and forth and, in general, just wasting a lot of time, this tool makes it quite easy to check out every property in a given country in a short time (assuming you've got a decent internet connection ).

Randy and the folks at the House of Miles have agreed to host the file. You can browse it here. The House of Miles has put it up divided by country, so it's easier to browse. However, if you need the entire spreadsheet, let me know and I'll see that you get a copy.

Note: It's in the process of being put up, so every country isn't there yet. When it's done, I'll edit this post to remove the caveat.

Any additions, omissions, corrections, etc. will be dealt with. I'll try to keep it up to date, since the list seems to change fairly frequently.

If it seems useful, maybe I'll do the same thing with the Preferred Hotels associated with the Choice chain.

The job got a little tedious at times; I strongly doubt I'll ever do something like this for the US properties.

Enjoy.