Last updated on January 18th, 2017 at 08:11 am
I just booked a flight that has my stomach in knots for many reasons. It’s equally exhilarating, unknown, scary and awesome.
First, some background. While I’m still slowly posting about my honeymoon trip from September/October of this year, I have actually been planning our first anniversary trip to French Polynesia for June of 2013 for quite some time.
In fact, I booked business class award flights from LAX to PPT on Air Tahiti Nui in July using Skymiles before we even went on our honeymoon. In order to secure business class space on the rarely available flight from the US to Tahiti, I had to book it exactly 330 days before the flight was scheduled to depart. The earliest you can book a flight on most airlines is 330 days out, and when seats sell out fast, you book as early as you can.
Booking that flight was quite easy through the Delta airlines call center. It was the easiest award flight I have ever booked with that airline. After securing the main flight to Tahiti and reserving 5 nights at the Hilton in Moorea, I decided to wait until “later” to book the rest of the trip, which included a stop in the Cook Islands.
Well, now that we are in the new year, I have decided that “later” is now and I needed to cement our plans. This includes booking a flight to the Cook Islands and nights at a hotel. Here is where things get nerve wracking.
In doing research a few months back, I learned that there are essentially 2 ways to get from French Polynesia to the Cook Islands.
1) The first is to fly American Airlines back to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Aukland and Aukland to Raratonga in the Cook Islands
This option takes 48 hours and costs over $4,000 per person. IN COACH! Let’s just say that this is not appealing at all.
2) The second option is much less expensive and time consuming, but leaves no margin for error
This option involves booking a flight on a turbo-prop plane on the domestic airline of French Polynesia, Air Tahiti (different than Air Tahiti Nui).
In doing research, I learned that there is a single weekly flight between Papeete and Raratonga that flies every Thursday. It flies to the Cook Islands and back on the same day, and it’s fairly reasonably priced at $665 per person.
Air Tahiti is clearly the best option for the flight, but it also leaves a lot of room for uncertainty.
Concerns, there are many
Here are my concerns:
- If it only flies once a week, what happens if something goes wrong and the schedule gets messed up? Are we stuck?
- What if the flight is late and our hotel stays are not refundable? What can we do then?
- Do we really want to fly a turbo prop plane for 3 hours over the wide open Pacific ocean?
- What if our plans change?
- Why isn’t this airline recognized or bookable on any other websites? Why must I book it on the Air Tahiti website?
- Why can’t I use points to book this flight? Boo!
Amazingly, even with all of this uncertainty, I was able to talk it over with my wife and decide to book the flight. So I went to the Air Tahiti Website and took the plunge.
Booking on Air Tahiti – Are We Booked?
The booking experience on the Air Tahiti website was interesting in itself. All prices were listed in XPF (the currency of Tahiti I guess?) and also featured a friendly conversion into Euros (but not dollars). I know that the price was around the $665 listed above, but it’s still sort of makes you nervous to see an amount of 119,974 of anything on your subtotal.
Even weirder was the fact that you actually don’t pay online. You reserve space and then they will send you a link to pay within 72 business hours.
Here’s hoping to this working smoothly.
The result is worth it
The Cook Islands are a place that my wife has wanted to visit ever since she studied abroad in Australia during law school. I have fallen in love with the area through photos as well, and can’t wait to get there. I just hope that everything goes off without a hitch. It will be well worth it to wake up here:
Stay tuned for a future post where I talk about booking the hotel!
