The location is attractive apart from the ever-present local mosquitoes . Colorful fish are a plenty to watch from the rather pleasant restaurant . But those guys just cheated us on the reservation we made :they deliberately ignored the type of faré we had reserved (deep water , full ocean view , etc.) and paid for , and they parked us into a desolate room overlooking quasi-brackish one-foot deep water .

All the French manager could tell us was basically : " S...t happens , we're overbooked". Instead of five nights we only stayed overnight and headed straight back to Bora Bora after I spent hours on the phone reorganizing our trip .
Worst hotel experience I ever had in my life. Too bad , as all other hotels we stayed at in FP were just a dream come true.

Beautiful isolated hotel. The rooms are huge but outdated. It is a great hotel to stay four or five days. The service is very good and the food was the best one in FP. The shuttle connects you with the town each hour. But, having said this, we must say that this hotel is absolutely overpriced. We paid 770$ per day for a beach bungallow, which was the same price we paid for a premium overwater bungalow in Moorea (Sofitel). The Sofitel Hotel, even not so isolated, is a superb new hotel with really modern installations and superb bungallows. And it was not so much cheaper than the OWB in the intercontinental Thalasso in Bora Bora, the best resort I have ever been.

As a conclusion: it is a good charming hotel, but the rates do not make any sense.

P.D: Huahine is the most beautiful island in FP, even better than Bora Bora. Enjoy it.

My wife and I spent 4 nights at Te Tiare in October 2007 after first traveling to New Zealand for 7 days, Papeete for 4 days and cruising on the Paul Gauguin for 11 days. The stay at Te Tiare was the highlight of our trip.

If you are looking for the ultimate location for a romantic and/or relaxing vacation, this is the place. If you are looking for exquisite service in a Ritz Carlton type fashion, you should look elsewhere. Come to Huahine and Te Tiare to have a true Polynesian experience. I reviewed numerous web sites and guide books before booking our trip. The sense that I got from this research was that Huahine was today similar to what Bora Bora was like 30 or 40 years ago. We were not disappointed.

This resort has the best of both worlds. It is only accessible by boat and is thus very secluded. However, the boat is very convenient and only a 15 minute ride from the charming town of Fare. You truly have the convenient option to simply stay at the resort and relax or make the choice to explore Huahine.

The transfer from the airport was totally seamless. A taxi met us at the airport (with a sign for the resort) and took us to the dock in under 10 minutes. The boat was waiting and immediately took us to the resort. The views from the boat are excellent as it makes its 15 minute journey up the coast of the island. We took the boat numerous times into the town. The boat ride was like a mini excursion each time we took it.

Fare is small but has many services. There is a large by Polynesian standards – small by US standards grocery store. The range of products is huge, from a bag of Doritos to an entire pig (for roasting) – from diet coke to Veuve Cliquot – from fresh baked French bread to snorkeling equipment. It makes a lot of sense to stock up here on snacks and drinks for your room. There is also an Avis office, an internet café, a dive shop and several souvenir shops. The people in the town were very friendly and went out of their way to say hello in both Tahitian (ia orana) and in English

There are also several restaurants in the town. We ate at the New Te Marara which is right on the town dock. They have a happy hour there from 5:30 to 6:30 with Maitai’s etc. priced at about $5. The outdoor tables at the restaurant face west, so it is a great place to watch the sunset before going inside for dinner. The food was very good and there were about 10 different choices of fish and 3 or 4 choices of beef.

We also ate at Les Dauphins. It is about a 10 minute walk from the dock. The menu was similar to Te Marara. Les Dauphins is away from the water so there were a few mosquitoes in the outside dining area. It is worth going to, but make sure you bring bug repellent. There is another restaurant just to the right of the dock for the Te Tiare boat. But it was not open while we were there.

We ate two dinners and three lunches at Te Tiare, and the food was very good.

The resort itself was excellent and of course the overall setting was beautiful. We had room #39 which was a deep over water bungalow. The rooms are incredibly large. In fact the bathroom was almost as big as our entire over water bungalow that we had stayed in at the Intercontinental in Papeete. The deck was also very large and was perfectly designed such that part of the deck was always in the sun and part was always in the shade. Also, all the bungalows face west so that every afternoon we got to enjoy seeing the sunset over Raiatea and Taha’a.

The resort only has 41 rooms so that nothing was ever crowded. There are three definitive choices for swimming: off your deck, pool and beach. The pool was fairly basic, but on two separate days my wife and I were the only ones there, which made it very enjoyable. The beach is very nice and unlike most of the beaches in French Polynesia, the sand was soft and you did not need beach shoes. Nothing can top having a coffee or bloody mary on your deck at 10:00AM and then diving directly off your deck into the ocean. Yes, the grocery store in Fare does have V8 juice and vodka, and there are coffee machines in the rooms. The grounds around the resort were very well manicured. Also, it looks like all of the roofs have been replaced, which it appears from previous posts on this site were a problem last year.

The staff at the resort were extremely friendly, although some did not speak English. It did prove to be a lot of fun using pidgin English and pidgin French and a few hand signals. The service was very good, based on the standard of “island time”. But again, that is why you come here. The most important part was that the staff were always trying to be friendly and helpful. As an example, since we had a 6PM flight we asked for a late check out. With no problem and no additional charge, we got a very late check out. Contrast that with our experience at the Intercontinental in Papeete where the front desk wouldn’t even talk to us about a late check out. We also arrived early at Te Tiare at about 10 AM and were immediately given our room.

My wife appreciated a lot of the little things common at the resort: a warm welcome with leis and a fruit drink, a necklace upon departure, lunch on the beach or on our deck, a conch horn welcoming all new guests and of course beautiful views all day long.
One last piece of advice. Learn a few words in Tahitian. It is very simple to learn how to say, hello, goodbye, thank you, very good etc. You will get an extremely warm smile from every Tahitian by simply greeting them with ia orana. Incredibly, “Maitai” means “good” in Tahitian.

Dollar to satisfaction, Te Teira was the worst hotel experience my wife and I have ever had.

On our two week honeymoon in FP, which also took us to the Sofitel in Moorea and the St. Regis in Bora Bora, we purposefully chose to book a few nights at Te Tiare to experience an "un-Westernized" version of FP. Huahine seemed to fit the bill and Te Tiare is the only "luxury" resort on the island. Unfortunately, all we ended up doing was paying over $900 per night for a Motel 6 quality room in a tropical paradise setting. Not only were all of the furnishings old in our deep overwater bungalow (which are the most expensive rooms in the resort), but also incredibly cheap. The "mattress" was about a two-inch thick pad and the bedding was disgusting.

The power in our deep overwater bungalow went out on the last night. We called the front desk and they sent a guy out. After investigating for a few minutes, the only English he could muster, with a shrug of the shoulders, was "tomorrow." As in "I have no idea what the problem is, we'll deal with it tomorrow." That didn't work so well for us as we were leaving the next day. I spent several minutes fiddling with the circuit breakers and finally realized that the lights would work if we cut the power to the wall-mounted A/C unit. So we decided spending the evening in a muggy, but lit, room beat spending the evening in a muggy and pitch black room.

The hotel does have one really neat feature: when your power goes out and you have no A/C, the hot water for the entire resort automatically goes out the next morning so that you can enjoy an ice cold shower to cool yourself off after the prior night's sweat-soaked slumber.

When we checked out we mentioned the power and lack of hot water issues to the receptionist, and asked what the hotel was going to do to compensate us (and other guests - she mentioned that there was no hot water on the entire property) for the inconvenience. She spoke with the manager and all they would offer was to comp us the spaghetti room service my wife and I shared the night before.

Spaghetti in FP, you might ask? That's because the seafood dishes we ordered for our other meals at Te Tiare (as well as one pork dish) were terrible. You can't screw up simple spaghetti with meat suace. And to their credit, they didn't. Further, there aren't many other options on the island of Huanine, and the few that you may find are an hourly boat ride away. You are pretty much stuck with Te Tiare's food.

Anyway, we turned down their insulting offer of comping our $25 meal and instead will fight the good fight to have our last night's room rate refunded. It is obvious this place is struggling for every dollar they can get their hands on (we asked, only 16 of the 41 rooms were occupied), so I'm not holding my breath.

A premium overwater bungalow at the recently and beautifully renovated Sofitel in Moorea, at approximately $700 per night, was in our opinion a steal. And the St. Regis in Bora Bora was probably the nicest resort I've ever stepped foot on. Do yourselves a favor and skip Te Tiare, and Huahine in general, and spend a few extra days in Moorea or Bora Bora.