Getting to Bora Bora

As mentioned up above, getting to Bora Bora is simple because there really is only one practical way of doing it. First thing you’ll need to do is get to Tahiti. This process is explained in the article linked above, but the short version of it is that you’ll most likely be flying from Los Angeles to Tahiti, and it’ll probably be on Air Tahiti Nui or maybe Air France.

You can book your entire journey on any travel-booking website. The best and most popular flights from Los Angeles to Tahiti tend to leave around 11:40pm and arrive in Tahiti around 5am in the morning, taking a bit over 8 hours when including the time zone change. Flights from Tahiti to Bora Bora, as well as all the other islands in French Polynesia, start departing around 6:45am, making for a pretty short layover.

When flying into Tahiti, you’ll most likely find yourself on Air Tahiti Nui, which is an international airline that flies huge and comfortable jumbo jets. After that flight, you’ll change planes to board Air Tahiti, which is the domestic airline of turbo-prop jets, and is not affiliated with the international one you may see commercials for. Because the airlines do work together with their schedules, if the long-haul flight is a bit late the island planes will gladly wait for them. However, with that said, still you’ll need to get your luggage and go through Customs and Immigration in Tahiti anyway.

When booking flights, you’ll find that there are around 7 flights per day from Tahiti to Bora Bora, starting at 6:45am and the last one going out at 5:10pm. Most go nonstop to Bora Bora, but a few of them stop off at another island for 15 minutes in order to drop off and pick up passengers. A nonstop flight will average around 45 minutes, whereas one that stops will take about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Again, you can book your entire journey for a single fare, and that will choose the most efficient connecting flight for you, or perhaps give you options of connecting flights, with longer layovers usually saving you a good bit of money.

If you’d like, you can also book the Air Tahiti flights in person once you have arrived. The prices are the same either way, making it so that you can book separately on the Air Tahiti website as well. These inter-island services all over the world usually operate in the manner that buses or ferries do in that locals use them frequently for a variety of things. Because of this, there’s almost always a few seats available at the last minute, and even if this one is full then the next one an hour later should have seats.

A very popular thing for honeymoon couples to do is to stay at 2 or more different resorts that are housed on different islands over the course of about 7 to 14 days. Doing so gives couples a chance to experience the beauty of one island before traveling to another to experience a different set of features. Unlike the Maldives, the islands and resorts in the South Pacific are actually very different from each other. With this noted, you’ll find that for the small cost of an extra Air Tahiti flight or two, people can get a lot more out of their trip.

There are actually two resorts with overwater bungalows on Tahiti itself, so that’s an option, but honestly the best choices on the other islands are on Moorea, which is very close to Tahiti and reachable by a 30-minute ferry ride, or the overwater bungalows elsewhere in the South Pacific. All of them are easy to reach with an Air Tahiti flight.

Photo by scalleja on Flickr