I just bought 32000 points through the US Getaway program and I am researching how to get the best value out of the points? What I have found so far is to use the points to redeem hotels in Europe, e.g. Paris.

For example, a night at Comfort Hotel Andre Latin in Paris costs 150 Euros but it is available for redemption at 8000 points!

I personally think it is a great way to maximize the value of points. Please share your way of using the points. Thanks.

Just be aware that the redemptions values can change (drastically). Many hotels in Europe over the past year went see-sawing between 40k/night and 8k/night and 40k and 8k and 40k and 8k. Not necessarily with rhyme or reason or predictability.

So you have to be able to take advantage of it. And the problem with Europe is that if you only bought the ponts and never "stay" at Choice normally, you presumably have no status, and therefore only a somewhat limited "booking window". To be sure you can get a hotel at 8k points per night, you have to actually book it. But if you have no status, by the time you book, you may have trouble finding a good airfare to wherever it is.

To me 32K isn't enough, because it's only 4 nights if you happen to grab a hotel at 8K/night when you can actually use it.

A great way to use points that doesn't require gambling in the above way is for Scandinavia, where great hotels that cost $200++ a night are usually just 16k points a night. But if you only have 32k points, that's only two nights. Which seems an awfully short time for a trip all the way to Norway or Sweden or wherever. (And the whole reason they're so valuable for Scandinavia is that often the hotels there are expensive, and most other brands familiar in the US have little to no presence there, especially beyond the big capital of each country.)

So I'm not sure what a good redemption value would be for someone with only 32k points who has no status.

(I earn my points on cheap suburban US motel stays, on nights where I need to stay somewhere anyway, during those stay 2 times and earn 8000 points promos. I thus always have oodles of points, and I'm burning off old ones as I earn new ones. I thus can't put myself in the situation of only having 32k points and then trying to figure out where to use them, because I always have way more and just use them for where I want to go if Choice hotels exist there and are a good redemption at that time. The one time I grabbed an 8K hotel in Europe, for last fall in Venice, I was able to book it only because I am Diamond and thus can book 100 days in advance; and I was able to buy a reasonable air fare only because I had the hotel confirmed just under 100 days in advance.)

Btw, I wouldn't be surprised if it's exactly because of the narrow booking window, and the difficulty with coordinating that with travel plans other than the hotel, that Choice doesn't mind having these 8k Europe sales. They know they won't be swamped with people using them because the logistics preclude it being as easy to use as people might think at first.

That might well be true. I was planning a trip to Italy last year and bought enough Choice points in the 2011 Daily Getaway to pay for 5 nights at 25k points a night. It was nerve-wracking to watch the price fluctuate between May, when I bought the points, and September, when I booked the rooms. In the end I was lucky to book them at 8k points a night, and now am off-loading the excess in places like Grand Rapids, Michigan. Still good deals, but not as good as the Bolivar in Rome or the Atlantic in Milan.