I just wanted to brag a little about my experience with booking my flights. My wife and I found a good deal for flights to Athens, Greece (my wife's family is from Cyprus, so flights to Cyprus from Athens are usually very reasonable) for around $400-500 depending on when/where you flew from. But, we decided to just use our points instead. On the UR website the flights would've been 180k of our 220k points. But through United, it was only 120k points, so we transferred the points and booked those. A couple of our friends were interested in joining us, so we looked at booking the same flights and they were over $2,000 per person one way. So we searched for other options, found a flight from NYC straight to Cyprus for $275. We cancelled our flight there with points and ended up buying 4 of those. And we found flights back for $260 so we cancelled our flights back and booked 4 more of those.
TLDR: Booked flights with points, cancelled the flights and are flying 4 people round trip to Europe for under $2200.
If you are interested in reading more details about what went down, you can check out my blog in my signature