If you're travelling mostly to rural areas, you probably need to go Priority Club. Holiday Inn is ubiquitous, and the other chains are not. Will your company not let you do that?

If not, I think I'd go SPG just because I think there's probably more availability.

Rural areas probably rules out SPG, due to the number and locations of properties. Marriott has a few more properties than Hilton, iirc, but at 40-50 nights/year, you won't get past GLD at Marriott, and may be able to make a higher tier at Hilton. Priority Club and other aren't ones I'm familiar with, so look into those.

If you know the actual locations, so what's there to make the choice. And read the many threads comparing the programs.

I was trying to be ironic. Cheap Elite was spot on. The OP posted this question in a couple of forums, didn't bother to read the stickies and didn't do a search. And the information he had given us was so vague, that we can not give him a good advice anyway.
We would need to know where the OP is traveling to, are the corporate restrictions, what does the OP want? Upgrades? Free nights? Free breakfast?

And of course if you ask the SPG forum which hotel chain is the best you will NOT get Hilton as an answer. And if you ask the Hilton forum you will not get Starwood as an answer. So again me trying to be sarcastic.

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I personally like Hilton the best. There are such a wide variety of hotels ranging from Hampton Inns all the way up to Conrad by Hilton it makes it easier to qualify for status. Doubletrees are probably my favorite Hilton brand hotel (excluding actual Hilton Hotels)

I used to be a Marriott groupie but I've recently converted to Hilton. Better properties, IMO. And there's always the chance that Paris will be there....

I ended up in HHonors because my company's travel planner books us in ALOT of Hamptons (before I got on her good side and started booking my own hotels). Having been w/ HHonors for about 6 months with a travel frequency similar to the OPs, I'm on track to make Diamond by Feb. Combined w/ HHonors AMEX Platinum (around $1.5k/month) I've already acrued around 175k points, enough for 6 nights at a 4 star in Hawaii that I'll probably book soon for early next fall.

One of the things I like most about HHonors is the DoubleDip feature. For stays at Hamptons & Homewoods I go w/ the Points + Points option for 50% more base points. For all the other properties I go for Points + Fixed Miles for short or cheap stays and Points + Variable Miles for longer stays costing over $500. On an $80/night 2-night stay at a ES, 500 SkyMiles are worth more than 800 extra HHonors miles.

The ability to gain status based on stays is also great. If I'm on a 2 or 3 night trip and there are multiple similarly priced HHonors properties nearby, I'll hop from one to the other to get the extra stay credits. If you hit 2 properties on every 2-night trip (twice a month), you'd make Diamond in 7 months (though you're already Gold, so probably much quicker).

My order of preference from high to low is : Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton

Hilton or Starwood have definately nicer hotels than Marriott.

I doubt you can go wrong with either.

I have top status in both Hilton and IC(Royal Ambassador) and prefer them. To the point that some have already made, it helps to know what you are looking for. My travel is to a mix of smalle and large cities. In smaller cities and towns they only have a Hampton or Holiday Inn. But in larger cities you have Hiltons, HGI's and Crowne Plaza's. Then you have the top tier, Conrad's and Intercontinental's.

These hotels work for me because they have places to stay when I travel on business and they have destinations that I would like to visit on reward. Most FTer's would tell you to find a place you want to go for free and stay in that chain on business. IC and Hilton have a good mix of properties both in number of locations and variety of quality.

Another reason I like both is that it is fairly easy to attain the top tier in both programs with my travel patterns. Hilton Diamond can be attained easier with number of stays than number of nights. IC can be a bit harder but if you are only interested in PC than that can be done in a matter of a few weeks.

Thats my two cents on Intercontinental and Hilton. Marriotts are good but I chose Hilton due to Marriott requiring more nights for Plat status. Starwoods have great properties but only in a a few locations where I travel.

For rural, I'd probably go Hilton. Hamptons are generally nicer than Fairfields and there aren't really enough 4pts to provide great coverage.

Only reason I'd deviate is if you know for a fact you're going to places that have newer and well taken-care-of Choice or Priority Club hotels. Those programs can be rewarding, if you know what you're doing in terms of finding decent hotels within those chains.

In Sydney, Paris Hilton stayed at the Sheraton on the Park, just a block away from the Hilton Sydney. So you might want to go with SPG if you really want to see Paris.