sheraton tahiti

has anyone stayed at this establishment? is it relatively close to the main town and local groccery and markets?

I should also ask a supplementary question as well.

We have to check out at 11am but our flight does not depart until 2.30am the next day.

We can either pay a full day rate at the hotel (the least favourable option) or rent a car and drive around for the day or dump our bags at the airport and just walk around in the town until time to go back to the airport. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do for such a long wait?

thanks for any advice you are able to offer.

The Sheraton is a mile (1.6 kilometers) from downtown. The main (traditional) market is there. It's about a half mile from the Champion Supermarket on Rue du Commandant Destremeau (towards town).

They won't just store your bags and allow you to hang by the pool?

Spending the afternoon starting with a lunch in a cafe, then souvenir shopping and seeing Papeete, stopping in another cafe for some coffee, then dinner at les roulottes which begin setting up at around 6-6:30 by the tourist office is not a bad way to spend the time. Your plan to drive around the island is also a good one.

Post your question on the Tahiti Explorer forums also.

i've stayed at the sheraton. it's ok - 4 star.

you can walk into town (i did) but it'll take you about 1/2 hour. better to get a taxi.

I stayed there for a night last September (and just put up a review at tripadvisor). I was impressed with how nice they were, having had my expectations about hotel staff in Papeete taken pretty low by reviews before we left.

They stored our bags while we went to Moorea for a night and until we came back aroud 6pm the next day. We had some dinner, listened to the bar band play, no one minded us being there as we were patronizing the bar. We got our bags around 8 pm (no charge, tipped of course), and took taxi to airport for our 12:30 am flight.

When we left for Moorea we took a taxi to the docks. Can't say how it would be to walk.

I enjoyed eating at the roulottes. If you have no luggage to watch it would be my choice for dinner. We had bags with us when we came in from Moorea so we elected to go straight to the Sheraton. In fact they were willing to add those bags to the ones they were already watching.

One thing that surprised us was there weren't taxis waiting at the docks when the ferry came in like there are at the airport. We had to find a way to call one ... basically pay a lady a cpf to call us one. Not sure if there are taxis around later after the roulottes set up.

Note on departing flight -- we flew out of PPT twice on our trip, first time at 7 am and the place was locked up when we got there 3 hours in advance. No line at all ... so we assumed we could be relaxed catching our return flight to the US. Wrong. That line took a very long time to get through. Very crowded, very slow, we had dawdled in the cafeteria shuffling our stuff around and got in line about 2 hours before the flight ... and were like #200 in line ... big full plane, 767. It's hard to grasp that many people are leaving at such a gawdawful time of the morning ... lol.