Getting to Tahiti with AAdvantage Miles

Tahiti (“it’s a magical place”) is a place that many people only dream of going to. To put it bluntly, going to Tahiti is not cheap – even if you use miles for the flights and points for your hotel, you’re still going to have to pay for inter-island flights (although fixed points cards like Barclays Arrival can help with that). And even if you’ve got all that covered, you can’t really use points for food. But you can save thousands of dollars by booking an award ticket and you can do it with AAdvantage miles. Here’s how.

So here’s how my wife and I booked two tickets to Tahiti using AAdvantage miles. At the time I booked this (11 months ago), we were trying to get in before the Hilton devaluation, so we had to travel during President’s week. Well, I was a little bit paranoid we wouldn’t find award space, and Jess insisted we fly business class (even though it’s not lie flat, more on that later), so for a month beforehand I monitored award space to get a feel for how much is released and when. Here’s what I found out, which still seems to be the case to this day.

Part I: The picture of award space to Tahiti

The one carrier with the most flights to Tahiti is Air Tahiti Nui. If you can find award space, it’s bookable both using AAdvantage miles and Delta Skymiles. It will cost you 75K/125K AAdvantage miles (coach/business) and 100K/150K Skymiles (coach/business). Other carriers that service Tahiti are Hawaiian Airlines and LAN, but this post will just focus on Air Tahiti Nui.

So when I was trying to get a picture of award space, it coincided with Baby M’s first few months of life. What that meant was that I was up at all hours of the night keeping her and my wife company and to pass the time I was…searching for award space! As best as I can tell, this is how award space looks on Air Tahiti Nui for their LAX-PPT flight (and return).

1) In general, it seems that award space opens 331 days out (I’m certain of that) at 12:00 midnight in Tahiti (I’m pretty sure of that). So, consistently, I’d see the calendar load at around 5:00 AM EST (like I said, I was up all hours). There was a day or two when I saw the calendar load as early as 4:00 AM EST or as late as 6:00 AM EST, but for the most part, award seats were opening up around 5:00 AM EST for travel 331 days later. So, for example, on the day I’m writing this, Thursday February 13th, I think Air Tahiti Nui opened up their award space at 5:00 AM for travel 331 days from today – January 10th, 2015.

2) Most days Air Tahiti Nui opens up two business class seats and 4-6 economy seats.

3) In my experience, the business class seats go pretty quickly while economy seats hang around for awhile. Once seats are booked, it doesn’t look like Air Tahiti Nui releases any more seats into the inventory.

Part II: Searching for award space

The best way to search for award space on Air Tahiti Nui is expertflyer. There are ways to search for free, like Flightstats, but I couldn’t search for space on that site as soon as it opened up – only expertflyer gave me that flexibility. Honestly, if you are trying to save money on the flight, the monthly or even yearly fee on expertflyer could definitely be worth it to help you out.

If you have an account searching is pretty straightforward. Go to “Awards and Upgrades”, select Air Tahiti Nui (“TN”) as your carrier, and search between LAX and PPT for “I” (business) and “W” (coach) classes. I search +/- 3 days to get a picture of the award space around. As you can see, there are no seats in business on the return on January 14th already. This is something I’ve seen pretty regularly (which is why I would check at 5 AM ET!) – sometimes the space goes really fast or is never released in the first place so it’s good to be a little flexible.

Now, if you don’t want to pay for expertflyer, I still have some recommendations about how to get the space. Basically, you can just call AA and assume that the space has been released and ask them to look for you. I just don’t like spending tons of time on hold only to be disappointed! As soon as you can see the space on expertflyer AA can see it as well (right at 5 AM!). Also, if you’re a little closer in, you can search on FlightStats as Dariaus wrote about here.

Part III: Booking with AAdvantage miles

Booking with AAdvantage miles requires a few steps:

1) Call to verify there is space on Air Tahiti Nui from LAX-PPT outbound.

2) Put together the award from your home airport if possible.

3) Put the award on hold for 5 days (if desired).

4) Ticket the award

5) Rinse and repeat for the return flight

Let’s take a look at these step by step, along with my reasoning.

1. Call to verify there is space on Air Tahiti Nui from LAX-PPT outbound

Like I said in Part II, if you call 331 days out there should usually be 2 business class seats and a few coach seats available, especially if you call at 5 AM like I did! Since Air Tahiti Nui award space isn’t bookable online, you must call AAdvantage and pay the $25 per person phone booking fee. Now, I’ve found that the computer is super annoying and can never understand what I say – BUT if you keep pressing 0 you’re probably going to get connected to the domestic award booking agents and then have to wait on hold again as they reconnect you to the international award booking agents. Since Papeete (“pah-pee-eh-tay”) is super hard for the computer to understand, I’d suggest just saying your destination is something easy to understand, like Tokyo or Sydney. That will connect you to the right agent with a minimum of hold times.

When connected with an agent, just tell them you are looking for award space for Los Angeles (airport code LAX) to Papeete (airport code PPT). If you have looked up positioning flights from your home airport and there is availability, you can give them those flight numbers as well (just go to aa.com and search from your home airport to LAX). It can get a little tricky making sure your times match up, but it should be doable with some work. As long as there is space available for all flights, the agent should be able to put the entire itinerary together.

There is one and only one potential snafu. There is some random rule where American won’t issue award tickets if you cannot purchase a cash ticket with the same origin and destination. This will only affect you if you are leaving from a smaller home airport – bigger airports like JFK, Boston, O’hare, Dallas, etc., shouldn’t have a problem. If you run into that issue, just place the award on hold from the nearest big airport near you and think about whether it’s worth buying a positioning flight later. If they find the award space, especially in business class, always put at least the LAX-PPT leg on hold for five days – it gives you five days to think things over – if you don’t crazy people like me might “steal” it from you at 5 AM!

2. Put the award together from your home airport

I basically mentioned how to do this in step 1, but if you need a little more detail, this step is for you. Basically, you are just going to want to go to aa.com and do a search for an award from your home airport to LAX. You can do this right from the aa.com homepage, just type in your home airport as origin, LAX, as destination, click “one way” and “redeem miles” and input your travel date. Since most flights to Papeete are redeyes you pretty much have all day to get there.

Then just click “search” and as long as there is MileSAAver award space, you can add your flights from home onto your award (with the one exception I noted above). If you are flying in international business class, you can fly first class domestic on two-cabin flights (common) or first class business on three-cabin flights (rare except transcontinental flights from JFK). Both these are blue and marketed as business MileSAAver on aa.com. If there’s space just select the flights you want, write down the flight numbers and times, and give them to the agent when you talk to them.

3. Put the award on hold for five days

At this point, if everything is all set and you’re ready to go feel free to pull the trigger and book the ticket. I like to mull obsessively about my purchases, so I personally put our award on a courtesy hold for five days while I thought about whether we really wanted to go. Getting a courtesy hold is simple, once the itinerary is put together, just say, “could I please place the award on a 5-day hold?” They’ll say “sure”, ask for the names and birthdays of the passengers (so make sure you have those ready), and when they’re done they’ll give you a confirmation number. Easy peasy.

4. Ticket the award

The fun part is also the easiest part. Once you have decided for sure, call up, give them the confirmation number they gave you in #3, say you’d like the ticket the award, and then FREAK OUT CUZ YOU”RE GOING TO TAHITI!!!!

5. Rinse and repeat for the return flight

If you are booking in economy, I’d say you could probably wait and book the entire award as a roundtrip itinerary. The benefit to this is if you need to cancel it’s just one cancellation fee for the entire award. You also have only one confirmation # for your entire itinerary so it’s a little easier to keep track of.

If you’re booking in business class, however, like we did, I’d recommend booking as two separate one-ways? Why? Because if you miss out on the business class space on the outbound while waiting for the calendar to open up for the return you will be very sad. I would, at least. So in our personal case I decided not to risk it and booked it as two separate one ways. If we had had to cancel, it would have cost more money, but I determined that it was worth the risk.

Part IV: Business or economy class?

To put it bluntly, Air Tahiti Nui’s business class isn’t all that great. We flew in the old cabins and that definitely wasn’t anything to write home about. The new cabins are supposedly nice and pretty and new but they are still angled lie-flat. Now, if you’re like us, who get to vacation only once or twice a year and without the baby never, then I think it’s worth the splurge. If you’re rolling in AAdvantage miles, you could probably splurge too. But when you consider for only 10,000 miles more you could go to Hong Kong and back in Cathay Pacific first class, it makes you think… All that being said, traveling for that long, especially if you’re coming from the east coast, is exhausting so if you think angled lie-flat business class (at best) will help you, go ahead by all means. As always, it beats coach.

Final Thoughts

Getting to Tahiti on miles is difficult, but it is attainable. Overall our tickets cost 125,000 AA miles and $150ish in taxes and fees each, plus $400 for roundtrip flights to Bora Bora, but the end result was we are getting to celebrate our 5-year anniversary in one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever been. If you have time, you can even book stopovers in your AA gateway city (LAX) to make the travel a little easier. Also, you can probably use the same strategies I outlined here to book the same flights on Delta, the only difference is the outlay in miles, the greater degree of difficulty in finding connecting flights, and the fact that your itinerary must be roundtrip. Still, so far Tahiti and Bora Bora have been worth the work. Good luck!