If you read my blog regularly, you know that I absolutely love French Polynesia and especially Bora Bora — I just got back from my 5th time visiting French Polynesia and my 4th time visiting Bora Bora (where I got to stay at the new Westin Bora Bora).
On every other trip to Bora Bora — a roughly 50-minute flight from Papeete, Tahiti — I’ve flown Air Tahiti and every flight has been smooth. But I booked Air Moana to write a review of a new airline and, unfortunately, the airline couldn’t seem to get it’s act together and I was unable to check them out.
Before going into more details, my bottom-line is this: based on my experience, if you’re booking a flight from Tahiti (PPT) to Bora Bora (BOB), you are likely much better off booking Air Tahiti than going with Air Moana.
My experience with Air Moana was a calamity of errors, and it was actually pretty funny how bad it was at times.
The biggest issue was how many times the flights changed — my friend booked the same flight a few weeks prior to me, and his flight was changed four times between November 2024 and February 2025, with the original flight getting into Bora Bora around 8am and the finally-updated flight getting into Bora Bora at 1:30pm (basically switching from having an entire day to enjoy Bora Bora to only having a few hours to enjoy the sun).
On my end, the flight changed three times, but the last flight change was the worst as it happened the night before my flight to Bora Bora, while I was already on the plane from Los Angeles to Tahiti.
The new arrival time, 1:30pm, didn’t work on my end due to plans that I already had in Bora Bora, and I had to spend $44 on WiFi on my Air Tahiti Nui flight to book a new flight for the next morning (the reason I had to spend so much on WiFi was that Air Tahiti Nui charges by how much data you use and I guess it took a lot of data to review my e-mails about the flight change and book a new one). Even worse, given the last-minute nature of the change, me and my friend were no longer able to get tickets on the same flight, so I landed in Bora Bora a few hours before him.
Also, when Air Moana changed the flight time the first time, I received at least three e-mails to inform me of the change, they sent me a few WhatsApp messages, and even called me. I was really confused by all of this outreach, so I called them back and Air Moana said they kept reaching out to me because I “never confirmed” that I was okay with the new flight time. The only thing was that no communication about the flight change from Air Moana asked me to confirm if I accepted the change, it was just a notice of a change.
While I understand that operational changes happen, needing to change a flight four times within a matter of about three months is something I’ve never experience before (and I’ve never experienced the e-mail/WhatsApp/call situation either).
One other hiccup: I booked the flight through Capital One Travel and when I booked it, the reservation e-mail said my flight was booked on “Air Madrid.” I was unable to use my booking reference to see that my flight was actually booked on Air Moana, so I had to e-mail them to get confirmation. While they did confirm I was booked on the flight, it made me nervous that I wasn’t able to use my ticket or booking number to check my reservation on their site and the airline name was wrong in Capital One’s systems.
Based on this experience, though I plan to return to Bora Bora hopefully dozens of more times, I will never book a flight with Air Moana again.
2 comments
You are flying an airline with a network of 5 or 6 stations, and yet flying with only two aircraft.
What do you think happen when an aircraft goes tech?
I’ve flown many small airlines in remote locations and realize that you need to have flexibility when flying them — that’s why I didn’t make a big deal out of the first two schedule changes and just laughed off the bombardment of messages from them. But the third schedule change, a night before my flight, that would have affected my travel plans the next day was where I drew the line and is not something I’ve encountered with any of the other smaller airlines I’ve flown. And btw, you’re assuming the last change was because of a technical issue — they never communicated the reason behind the last change with me (in fact, they didn’t reach out at all and I had to find out from my friend who was on the same flight).