Choice in Europe?
 

Been away for a long time - work/no work and all that.

Anyhow - looking to celebrate return of some sort of "normalcy" in a few months, and I've been looking through the Choice web site for some of my old favorites in Europe (London, Paris, Nice, etc.). They seem to have all pretty much disappeared. I barely recognized most of them, and there weren't many left. Has Choice abandoned Europe, or is this just ... something. Maybe I'm not doing it right.

At any rate - good to be back.

Choice is still outstanding value in Scandinavia.

There are also some seemingly random hotels joining the Ascend Collection, but the website makes it incredibly difficult to just explore the possibilities...

I'm still seeing a pretty decent selection in London, Paris, and Rome although there might have been a few changes since I last looked. I do know that in Ireland, Choice no longer has a lot of options. Almost ten years ago, they had great places in Dublin (my best Choice redemption ever--8000 points per night at the Clarion IFSC for a two-room suite, top floor, with a balcony overlooking the Liffey), Sligo, and Cork. I stayed at all three but none of them are part of Choice now. I believe all three were part of a single ownership group so when the decision was made to pull one hotel from Choice, all of them shortly followed.

Yeah - I took my whole family (including SO's) to Ireland back some years ago. If they all came, about 12 people. We had initially rented a house, but the owner pulled out a couple of weeks before the trip.

In a panic, I scoured the listings to see where my points would take us, and I ran across the Clarion IFSC (I think it was about 10,000 points/night) so I booked.

Oh man! two of the rooms were corner suites (second floor?) with both balconies and party decks. The other rooms were just gigantic suites. We had a fabulous time and I agree - one of the best redemptions ever, in any of the programs I was in.

Sad to see Ireland so poorly represented by Choice these days.

My other Choice choices were in the south of France, and they're pretty much gone, as well as some others we had stayed at in Paris. They never were in Amsterdam.

Guess I'll just have to save the points for domestic rooms. Now that my Marriott points are gone (along with my status), I'm left with Choice and Hilton. Hi ho.

Yeah, I think there was a period in Ireland when the Clarion IFSC royally treated American members redeeming points. I had two visits with those great suites, and then slowly, but surely, I was given smaller rooms until it left Choice. It's now called The Spencer Hotel. At the time of my first stays, I remember a lot of hoopla being made about the Westin Dublin, but I vastly preferred the Clarion. Not only was the hotel just as nice, it was located in a slightly quieter section of town although not far from the action.

Good to see we're getting the band back together. :)

What you're not doing right is coming to conclusions based on searching for hotels in Europe during a time when Europe is having a new big Covid surge, and in fact UK has just imposed a steep fine for anyone vacationing in the next few months:

https://www.flyertalk.com/articles/b...june-2021.html

In case you're not aware, Europe's vaccination efforts have been going even more slowly than those in the US.

So it could be that these many of these hotels are just shut down (or taken over for official quarantining by the government) until all of this ends.

So it's hard to say right now which of those hotels may be permanently gone vs which may be just temporarily gone.

I noticed the same thing. Maybe it's all COVID related and when there is some return to "usual" perhaps new properties will appear. CH needs to do more and get busy east of "the pond" with more hotel sign-ups all across the Continent. I hope so.
With my COVID (nothing do do but sit around) clean up, I came across a 2008 Choice directory - they actually did print those catalogs before the modern internet/iphone age - and today's European offering are a shade of the olden days.