The Sunset beach Motel is a truly wonderful place to stay. The price is very reasoanble for a house keeping cottage on the water in French Polynesia. Although, as can be seen from the reviews, many of the guests are French, the owner and his wife speak perfect English. The cottages are very roomy (though the bathroom area is a bit small), and have a big veranda facing the water, and they are very far apart, so noise is never a problem. The hosts are very friendly and helpful, and were only too willing to make reservations for us at Restaurants, arrange travel plans, etc., at no charge. We are snorkelers. There were plenty of fish to see at the end of the pier and lots of bread to feed the fish, but we found the best snorkeling on a little motu called Bird Island. The motel is located in a large working plantation; there was always free fruit available. We had breakfast delivered one day and it was delcious, but each unit has a large, if slightly old fashioned, kitchen, and there are very good markets in Utaroa, so we usually prepared our own breakfast and lunch. The place is a bit isolated, which is part of its charm, so a car is very useful; we rented one for our whole stay. Raiatea is a fine, low key, untouristy place to spend a few quiet days; it has lots of good restaurants and snorkeling, the people are friendly, and the scenery is really lovely. We understand the sailing is also good. We certainly will return.

Sunset Beach has a site for camping which we stayed in. As it was off-peak season we had the camping area to ourselves which was good as there was a convenient shelter that allowed us to pitch our tent on sand under a roof - keeping us dry and safe from falling coconuts. It seemed to be normal for the campsite to have a regular stream of campers during off-peak, as a couple was leaving as we arrived, and another couple arrived the day before we left. During the peak season there are more people and the kitchen is well set up for numbers.

The highlight was the service - it is a family run business we always felt that they went out of their way to make our stay pleasurable. They knew what we wanted to do while we were there, and were able to find us the best tours for the best price. they were happy to take us into town to visit the supermarket, and airport transfers were free. We were ableto order fresh bread and croissants for breakfast and they dropped fresh fruit off to us everyday.

The surroundings were lovely, and you could swim off the jetty.

Drawbacks? Internet was slow and expensive (as is everything) and the rental on the bikes was a bit pricey, but this was more than compensated for by the rest of the experience.

We had a super stay at this quiet, spacious, tranquil property. Great memories!

Despite being out of town, we were correctly advised how to sightsee. On the day we wanted to drive round the island, the car was dropped off and picked up from our accomodation. When we went out for dinner a courtesy car was sent to collect us and take us home again.

Lovely service from the staff.

Wow! We really loved Sunset Beach. We stayed four nights. It was our first stop on our FP itinerary and it really allowed us to recover from over twenty hours in airports and begin to acclimate to FP. The accommodations were clean, simple and economical. The staff were cheerful and very helpful...they even arranged to send us our passports to our next location on a neighboring island when we discovered that we somehow left them in our bungalow.

The staff could not have been nicer. We really liked the little touches, such as the flowers on arrival to the freshly-cut coconuts in the fridge. They even arranged to take us to the grocery store for provisions. We did not need a car. They assisted with trip ideas and we were really glad that we took their advice to do the circle tour with Trucky Tours (very complete, personal tour of the island) and Sub-Hemisphere Scuba for our first time ever snorkeling (crazy us, we chose to snorkel for the first time on the ocean side of the reef with sharks and tremendous reef fish - WOW!)

Every evening, we got to enjoy our own sunset view. The place was incredibly economical. I am pretty sure that I could not find such a reasonably priced bungalow in the US. I highly recommend Sunset Beach!