Tahiti is one of the toughest destinations to get to on miles and points. There just aren’t many flights to Tahiti from the US to choose from, making options extremely limited. However, United just announced that it will be flying its 787 from San Francisco to Tahiti but that flights won’t begin until October 30, 2018.
Via VFTW, here are currently only three flights to Tahiti’s capital Papeete from the US:
- Air Tahiti Nui from Los Angeles (11 flights weekly)
- Air France from Los Angeles (3 flights weekly)
- Hawaiian from Honolulu (Saturday service only)
According to FlightConnections.com, there aren’t many flights to Papeete from other destinations, either.
Note: In May of 2018, low-cost carrier French Blue will be flying from Paris to SFO San Francisco to PPT.
So this new route from United should help a lot of people find more options to get to Tahiti in the future.
One interesting thing about this route is that it is scheduled to arrive at PPT at 9:25 pm. Since many tourists desire to connect to other islands within French Polynesia, such as Bora Bora, this means that they will likely have to spend a night at PPT and wait for a flight in the morning to connect them to their final destination. (Many connecting flights seem to stop running sometime shortly after 7pm.)
I’m not very optimistic about how open the awards will be for this route since this route is going to be in very high demand but at least there’s yet another option for getting to Tahiti, one of the toughest places to fly to.
Daniel Gillaspia is the Founder of UponArriving.com and the credit card app, WalletFlo. He is a former attorney turned travel expert covering destinations along with TSA, airline, and hotel policies. Since 2014, his content has been featured in publications such as National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and CNBC. Read my bio.
