Travel: A week in Fiji

I did quite a bit of traveling in 2025, and I’m way behind on writing about it, but here we go with an interesting destination: Fiji!! For a bucket-list trip, I told my best friend from high school to pick anywhere (literally, anywhere) in the world, and she picked Fiji, so off we went in May. I’ve never been to the South Pacific or even to Hawaii, so this was a whole new experience for me.

How it all started: Marriott Vacations

Perhaps, a shocker: this trip was actually quite reasonably priced, because my friend found an incredible package deal on Vacations by Marriott Bonvoy. This got us round trip airfare (LAX-Nadi) on Fiji Airways, plus four nights in a very nice room at the Fiji Marriott Momi Bay for $1,500 each (no kidding). So there’s my first tip: if you want to do a resort trip to somewhere that has a Marriott, start on their website!

Off we go to Nadi

I was able to get a points ticket on Southwest from Denver to LAX, so that cost me nothing. My friend and I met at LAX, and then we flew overnight, nonstop 11 hours from Los Angeles to Nadi, the major international airport in Fiji. Here’s another tip: A short-ish trip to Fiji is actually totally doable if you sleep well on planes (I sleep like a rock on planes), but could be really challenging if you don’t.

Because it’s a long flight and you go across the international date line, you lose a day on the way there (we left on Monday night and arrived Wednesday morning), so a one-week trip is really five days, and it’s a looong way to go for that amount of time. However, if you sleep well on planes, this is less of a factor because, at least from LAX to Nadi on Fiji Airways, you fly overnight both ways (leaving around 11 PM). For me, this was fantastic: I fell asleep before we took off, and woke up maybe two hours before we landed. But if you can’t sleep on the plane, you might never recover from the jet lag in that amount of time. Something to consider!

Momi Bay Marriott: Wow!

We landed in Nadi around 6 AM and took a shuttle to the Momi Bay Marriott, a seriously amazing place. It’s about a 45-minute drive from the Nadi airport, and we really loved the remoteness. I’m not that much of a resort-goer, and what I really didn’t want was Cancun, with side-by-side high-rise hotels and no nature. The Momi Bay Marriott isn’t that at all: it’s low-rise buildings (max two stories) in a very quiet environment with lots of jungle. The tradeoff is that there’s literally nothing else there: you could walk to a local convenience store, but that’s about it, meaning that unless you go on a day excursion (which we did, more on that below), you do everything else at the resort, and you eat only at their restaurants.

As you see in these photos, the Momi Bay Marriott is mostly over the water (the building with the barn-style roof is the main restaurant); when my family travels to the tropics we’re mostly tromping through the jungle, so this overwater luxury experience was totally new to me! We had a very nice “standard” hotel room (two queen beds, large bathroom, balcony overlooking the water) and for food, we did the “Momi Meal Deal,” which gets you the breakfast buffet, one item off the lunch menu, and either two items off the dinner menu, or the dinner buffet, depending on the night. I thought the food was excellent, and getting vegetarian food (always a bit of a roll of the dice on an international trip) was no problem. The resort had food packages at various price points; we got the least expensive which was around US $80 each per day for all three meals, and I thought it was totally sufficient! The servers were very helpful and considerate, we didn’t feel rushed, and we had no bad food.

I’ve never been to a five-star resort before so I have zero points of comparison, but this type of trip offers the opportunity for lots of stuff to do, or you can do nothing in a very beautiful place. We did some of each!

Tours and activities

The resort itself has various things to do: it’s a gorgeous place to hang out, and unlike stories I’ve heard of other resorts, it was no problem finding beach chairs or even a cabana (and you don’t pay extra for any of those), particularly if you get to the beach fairly early. There’s a gorgeous infinity pool looking out over the ocean, a nice, large swimming pool (with water aerobics, which I went to), extensive walking paths (but you can also be driven around in a golf cart), a nice gym, a spa (extra cost for that), and other activities like feeding the fish that live in the lagoons on the property.

I also felt like I wanted to see something of Fiji outside the resort, so we did two day trips: a full-day cruise to a small island off the coast of Nadi (Fiji consists of more than 300 islands so it was interesting to see some of them!), and a half-day land trip to the major sights in the Nadi area: the largest Hindu temple in the South Pacific (very cool!), a traditional Fijian village, and, believe it or not, American actor Raymond Burr’s botanical garden, where you can see tons of orchid varieties and also go hiking. Both of these trips were totally worthwhile and not expensive by US standards (around $100 per person including transportation from the resort). The entire Nadi area felt very safe, and the guides for all of these trips were very helpful (essentially everyone in Fiji speaks English).

The Momi Bay Marriott is overall a quiet place (which we enjoyed). There’s not much nightlife other than the on-resort restaurants and bars; there were rumors of a fire show on the beach, but it was raining that night and thus was cancelled.

Who goes to Fiji?

Fiji is not very close to, well, anything, so you might wonder who goes there. We encountered pretty much two categories of travelers: families from Australia and New Zealand (it’s a four-hour flight from the East coast of Australia) and American and Canadian honeymooners. I think the resorts there all have their own flavors: we saw some of the other resorts while picking up and dropping off other people on the tours we took, and I really liked the low-key nature of the Marriott. Some of the other resorts seemed more party-oriented, and the Marriott definitely attracts a lot of families. I like kids and don’t mind being somewhere that has a range of ages, but there also seemed to be adults-only resorts if that’s more of your thing.

Overall impressions

I’m generally more of an adventure travel person than a resort person, but I’ll say that this was a top-tier resort vacation. If you’re a resort person, Fiji is definitely the place to go. For example, one place I would absolutely never choose for a resort vacation is Cancun; I love Mexico, and I would go to Cancun to hang out with people I enjoy spending time with, but the wall-to-wall high-rise luxury hotel scene is 100% not my thing. Fiji, or at least where we went, is very different from that. The resort was all low-rise buildings, and it didn’t feel like they killed every living thing on the land in order to build it.

Resorts have their appeal, in that you don’t have to plan anything “extra” unless you want to. I really enjoyed the day trips we did, and it seemed like most people at the Marriott just stayed there and enjoyed it. I was also somewhat concerned about the “cruise on land” vibe (drunk people at the pool at 9 AM or whatever) and there really was zero unpleasant party action where we were. Thus I give Fiji two thumbs up if you can manage the flight and if you’re looking for somewhere beautiful and relaxing!

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