If you follow my Instagram – and let’s be honest there are few good reasons not to – you’ll have seen that I was living my best #luxelife in Bora Bora last month. Given that I was furloughed for most of January (#IdiocyInAction), the primary question from most of my friends was HOW?! Welp, in the interest of transparency and full disclosure and all that jazz, that trip was about as close to free as it was probably going to get. I went with my mom, and for my portion of the trip, the flight, lodging, and daily breakfast came to about $500. That’s traveling over 4,000 miles each way, sleeping every night and eating every morning in paradise for five…hundred…bucks. YES, please.
THIS is why I’m never home, ya’ll! I wasn’t even trying to go to Tahiti. Seriously. This pretty much fell into my lap with a lot of luck and a fair amount of vigilance. But when opportunity knocks, only a doofus shuts the door, and I, my friends, am no doofus. Let me back up and start over so I can fully explain the how of it.
How did you decide on Tahiti?
In short, I didn’t choose Tahiti; Tahiti chose itself. Back in October, I had a flight with Hawaiian Airlines to attend my cousin’s beautiful wedding in Kauai.
Unfortunately, there was an issue with the flight that resulted in about a 7-hour delay. SEVEN HOURS! Like, really?! I, ever the practical one, went to work to recoup a partial vacation day, and then headed to the airport to drink lots of wine.
Once we finally boarded, the airline was super proactive and handed out vouchers to each passenger worth up to $300 – the only catch being that it had to be used on a flight operated by Hawaiian Airlines. At this point, I’m like, well, cool, but this was my one Hawaii trip for the foreseeable future and I’ve thus far made it through 3 decades without flying this airline, so when exactly will I be able to use this voucher? But whatever, it was a nice gesture, and it significantly cut down on my bad attitude over missing one of the pre-wedding events. And I didn’t miss the actual wedding, so all was well – plus $300 free dollars and a year to use them.
Flash forward to around Black Friday (which I maintain is one of the best times to find a cheap flight), I started wondering what my options were for using that voucher. I took a look at Hawaiian’s flight map to see where they went besides Hawaii, and I saw they flew from Honolulu to both Papeete, Tahiti, and to Sydney, Australia. I checked Google Flights to see if there might be any point in the next year when a $300 discount might bring either of those places into the realm of affordability – I was thinking maybe I could take Hawaiian Airlines one way and use points to return home for a total cost of maybe $700 – when unbelievably, I saw that on a few dates in January, I could fly from Oakland to Honolulu to Papeete OR Sydney one way for $376 (Sydney was like $10-20 more). After applying the voucher that would have only been $76 one way!!
With much trepidation, I checked the return flights…and was absolutely floored to see United offering nonstops to San Francisco from Papeete for $217 across MLK weekend so I wouldn’t need to take much time off work. Even better, the flight appeared in the Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) portal, which meant I could completely cover it with points. Typically, I would have booked this flight using United miles, and it would have cost about 35,000 miles plus $50 in taxes. The pricing was so low that I was able to take advantage of the 1.5 cent value of my UR points in the travel portal, so I used less than 15,000 to wipe out the entire cash value of the ticket.
Round trip to Tahiti for $76? Let me just pack my bags right quick. You know what? Who needs a bag? *grabs passport and bikini*
okay, now what?
So, I had the ticket, but I had to figure out lodging. Since I was squeezing this trip into existing plans for 2019, the budget for this was pretty minimal. Generally, before I pay for a flight I do a quick search to get an idea of the lodging options, and this search had told me that both Marriott options were sold out on award nights (Marriott is where most of my hotel points are) and based on the remaining options, I’d be deciding on hostels for the trip. Which would have been fine, but then my mom decided to join me! Hostels aren’t really the Mama Leisa vibe, so after I switched my flight from Oakland to San Francisco to match hers, I had my work cut out for me looking for a place that would work for her and also for my minuscule budget.
After two weeks of unsatisfactory searching, I was coming around to the possible necessity of expanding my budget, when two award nights at the Le Méridien Bora Bora opened up for 60,000 Marriott points each! I won’t get into this too deeply here, but trust when I say that 60,000 points per night at this property is an incredible deal – basically half-priced compared to a year ago – and actually finding availability for these rates once you’re already locked into dates is near impossible). This covered two of the 5 nights I needed, but I grabbed them anyway, figuring we could find a nice Airbnb or boutique hotel on the main island of Bora Bora for the remaining days.
Five days later, I found the next two nights in an overwater villa bookable with points, but it required additional money (roughly $500/day) for the upgrade, since the points only get you the base room type. I booked it, deciding that IF I was going to spend silly amounts of money, it might as well go towards an unforgettable experience with my mom. Plus, since I had the 2 basic award nights already, the total cost of 4 nights would average to $250/night, and given my status with Marriott, chances were decent that they would just put us in the overwater villa for all four nights, instead of making us move rooms. Those rooms typically go for close to $1000 nightly, so even though this was more than I realllly wanted to dedicate to an unanticipated vacation, I was splitting it with my mom so it might have been doable. I had to put down a refundable deposit of about $525, and I had until December 20th to cancel, so I had a bit of time to weigh the pros and cons of forking over 240,000 points AND a thousand bucks. Yeesh.
THEN, three days after that, those same two nights of our trip opened up at the points only rate! It was perfect – our flight would arrive too late in the evening on the first day to get to Bora Bora from Papeete anyway. Miracle of miracles, I’d found four consecutive award nights on immovable dates in Bora Bora at steeply discounted rates! I canceled the paid upgrade reservation, the hotel moved my deposit over to the new reservation as a room credit (it would cover the $112pp speedboat to/from the airport, plus a few meals), and we were nearly good to go!
I do want to point out that this strategy would not have worked had I intended to take advantage of Marriott’s 5th night free when you use points for 5 consecutive nights. In my case, I could only do a maximum of 4 nights in Bora Bora, so it worked out.
The last few puzzle pieces involved where to stay the first night and trying, though mostly failing, to travel hack the flight from Papeete to Bora Bora. I decided to splurge a bit on our first hotel night and booked the Intercontinental Tahiti, which is close to the airport, is in a lovely setting on the water, and was a little under $400 for our one night (if you happen to have IHG points, a night here is 50,000 points, which isn’t bad given how easy they are to earn).
For the flight, only one airline flies that route, so you’re kind of stuck with whatever pricing they decide on, and on January 20th Air Tahiti (not to be confused with Air Tahiti Nui) wanted $385 -_- per ticket. RUDE. I used my $300 travel credit from my Chase Sapphire Reserve card to reduce this to $85. Typically, I wouldn’t consider this to be a discount since the annual fee on the card is $450. However, in this case, my annual fee wasn’t actually due until I returned from this trip, so in practice, it cut the out of pocket cost, or at least moved it to later.
hard cost recap – my portion
- Flight: San Francisco – Papeete: $76
- Intercontinental: $195
- Air Tahiti flight to Bora Bora: $385 – $300 Chase Sapphire credit
- Le Méridien Bora Bora: 240,000 Marriott points + $8 tax + $112 airport transfer
- Flight: Papeete – San Francisco: 14,459 Chase URs
- Breakfast: $34 for first day, complimentary the next four (Marriott status perk)
= $510 + 14,459 Ultimate Rewards + 240,000 Marriott Rewards
Well friggin done, self.
BUT. While the planning was a series of very fortunate events, the vacation itself was incredible! The kind of vacationing to warm the bougie corners of my budget-conscious heart. Starting with the fact that I got to fully escape winter for 5 solid days 😍 I mean, I love a good coat, but if I never had to wear one again, I would be just fine. So, next post – read all about the beach days of January.
