Booking Bora Bora with Points

Ready to book your vacation to Bora Bora? I’m breaking down exactly how I found our flights and hotels for our recent 6 night stay.

Finding flights to Bora Bora

When you are trying to find hard to find award flights, my strategy would be:

1. Sign up for a search tool where you PULL the data (search): seats.aero
The free version of this tool shows you 60 days. The paid shows you full year – I have & highly recommend the paid version to view the full year.

2. Sign up for alerts where you are PUSHED the data (award alert newsletter): Thrifty Traveler Premium Newsletter (use code Fancy at checkout to get $20 1st year subscription)

BOTH of these tools are my go-to to find the best award flights.

Here’s exactly how you are going to seats.aero to find availability to Bora Bora:

At the top of the page, select search
In the origin airport put SFO, LAX, SEA (these are the airports you may find direct flights from for Air Tahiti Nui flights, Air France & United – FYI, SEA has stopped direct flights for now)
In the destination airport, put PPT (this is the code for Papeete where you need to fly into before catching an inter island flight to continue on to Bora Bora)
We search one ways for award flights – so in the departure, put your dates and then you can add/subtract up to 180 days to get the widest search possible
Once your data comes up, click “economy” or “premium” or “business” to sort by that lowest point option
Once you find a date that works for the flight there, just the 2 blue arrow button by origin airport and destination airport to switch direction and find flights home
ALWAYS confirm availability directly with where you want to book before transferring poitns

In this image, you can see I sorted by “premium”.
When I hovered over that date, it told me how many seats were available.
If you need airline miles, check out the best offers here.

In late March 2025, we booked 3 business class flights to Tahiti on Air Tahiti Nui via Alaska Airlines for 60K points each way per person for February 2026. Availability for business class really ebbs & flows. That is why searching often and having an alert newsletter service is very key.

Be flexible on your dates
Plan to reposition to SFO or LAX for your flights there/back
Have different points currencies (Alaska Atmos Miles, transferable points, etc) so you can hop on the deal when you find it

Finding Marriott award nights for Bora Bora

We stayed 5 nights at St Regis Bora Bora and 1 night at Westin Bora Bora.

St Regis will cost more points per night, but allows 3 to a room
Westin standard award nights (lowest price) allow you to book directly into overwater bungalow
With St. Regis we could book the lowest point option (reefside villa) and pay $500/night to upgrade to overwater villa (I emailed hotel directly right after booking and asked for pricing)
With Westin, we had to book 2 rooms since we are a family of 3 – when emailing with the hotel about booking lowest point night and upgrading with cash for bigger room, it was not an option

*These are our experiences and may vary based on when you visit and hotel options during those times.

Here’s how to find the best point nights with Marriott:

Pull up the property you want to visit in the app
Where you would enter dates, select “My dates are flexible”
Then you will see nightly points with a month view

If you use points for all 5 nights, you get the 5th night free:

This is showing 5 nights at the Westin in November 2026. Which means now you are paying just 71K points per night!

Don’t lock yourself into branded points

For your Marriott stay, you may automatically think you need to go earn a bunch of Marriott points. Sure, you could do that. However, I’d go the route of earning Chase Ultimate Reward points or American Express Membership points. Why? Because several times a year, these banks have transfer bonuses to Marriott. There’s actually one right now that ends 2/28/26. Find current transfer bonuses here.

So my go-to would be earning flexible/transferable points via American Express® Gold Card, Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, or Chase Sapphire Reserve®. I’ve seen the transfer bonus as high as 70%!!

For example, let’s say you wanted to book that 5 night stay at Westin Bora Bora shown above for 355K points. If you were able to take advantage of a 50% transfer bonus, you’d only need to transfer 237K points (round up to nearest 1K)
MATH: 355,000/1.5=236,666.667

Is St. Regis Bora Bora or Westin Bora Bora best?

To be able to stay at either of these is unreal! Especially on points! I’ve got my full breakdown of the resort reviews here. Hope that helps!

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Opinions expressed here are the author’s alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.