- Air Tahiti Nui's new route connecting Papeete to Seattle and then Paris will start June 13.
- The airline started connecting Seattle and French Polynesia in October.
Air Tahiti Nui's will connect Papeete — French Polynesia's capital — to Paris via Seattle all year long.
The French Polynesian airline just unveiled its plans to extend its Seattle-Paris service, first announced last October, into the next winter season.
Air Tahiti Nui started connecting Seattle and French Polynesia twice a week in October 2022, and it will start extending the connection to Paris on June 13. The connection between Seattle and Paris will also happen twice a week.
The route complements Air Tahiti's existing route connecting Papeete to Los Angeles with onward service to Paris. Between the two of them, starting in June passengers will be able to fly from Tahiti to France seven days a week.
The decision to make the service a year-round thing comes from "the great response" Air Tahiti is getting from the market already, according to Mathieu Bechonnet, the airline's managing director.
Air Tahiti Nui will be the only carrier to offer nonstop flights between the South Pacific, the Pacific Northwest, and France, but airlines have been ramping up connections between the US and the South Pacific region lately.
Starting in May, Hawaiian Airlines will start flying to Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, and Delta started connecting Los Angeles and French Polynesia in December.
The French Polynesia-France route via the US might look like a fifth freedom route," in which one nation's airline transports passengers between two foreign countries. Singapore Airlines, for example, connects New York to Singapore via Germany, dropping off and picking up passengers in Frankfurt. It's worth noting, however, that French Polynesia is an overseas collectivity of France, which makes Air Tahiti Nui effectively a French carrier with all the rights to fly to France.