PARIS CDG AIRPORT   Passenger Reviews and Customer opinions

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  1 June 2009 : by S McMillan  (USA)

Customer Rating :  1/5

Queuing

Cleanliness

Facilities

Upon arriving at the airport is the lack of signage. Although terminal 2 was clearly marked, there was no indication of what airlines were in a specific terminal. It was only after we asked the driver that we determined what terminal to get off at. (We were flying American.) Inside the terminal things were no better. Although the monitors displayed where to check in for our flight, there were at least three different signs pointing three different directions for where we needed to be. (One pointed to a wall.) Check-in itself was quite efficient. There was only one restaurant near our gate and the food choices were singularly uninspiring. (The AA lounge wasn't much better - fortunately, we didn't have long to wait.) Despite the fact there was an available jetway, they transported us to our aircraft by bus. This is far from a world class airport.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  20 May 2009 : by Pete Crowman  (Romania)

Customer Rating :  1/5

Queuing

Cleanliness

Facilities

It is old, disorganized, mis-signed. I followed the signs to terminal 2A, and then got stuck at a dead end. I was staring at a huge sign with arrow <- for terminal 2a, facing a boarded up hallway entrance. No other sign indicating how one was supposed to route to the terminal. I was helped by an Air France employee who took me down stairs through the personnel only section. We passed some police, and he was like "no problem, he's with me." We cut under the airport drive through an employee only parking garage, some more zones and then I was delivered through a back entrance to Terminal 2a. Another soldier asked me if I was going to Tel Aviv (I wonder, do Tel Aviv passengers often appear from back entrances?), and then instructed me to go down a dark hallway. Ended up in 2a. The AA lounge is nice, but the airport as a whole needs to be much better if it is going to compete in the Eeuropean hub category.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  20 May 2009 : by Peter Lee  (Singapore)

Customer Rating :  1/5

Queuing

Cleanliness

Facilities

This is one of the worst airports I have ever been to - the only one to lose my baggage in a 3 hour transit! Facilities are dreadful, prices unrealistic, and all round service with a frown.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  14 May 2009 : by E Grossman

Customer Rating :  1/5

Avoid at all costs if you have any photographic equipment. While they have an x-ray, they seem to lack an understanding of its use and have you unpack all of your gear onto trays - what is the point to have the x-ray I ask. They do not use the explosive residue swab system for densely packed bags. Rude and arrogant, uncaring staff who could care less that you have your expensive gear laid out all over the place - bottom line, fly through a technologically savvy country and avoid Paris CDG Airport..

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  5 May 2009 : by William Read

Customer Rating :  2/5

Arriving from Havana, passport checks consisted of two armed police officers standing in a corridor attempting to look at passports; they gave mne a cursory glance only, there was certainly no electronic validation. Hardly adequate for 400 people arriving from Cuba! A bottle of alcohol purchased at Havana Airport was confiscated en route to check in for my connecting flight to Birmingham. The polite official said that this happens all the time especially with UK citizens flying in from Mauritius, the Seychelles and Cuba; he blamed the airports in these holiday destinations for selling the alcohol! He accepted that it weas a nonsense that the passengers on the flight HAV - CDG had taken these "dangerous" bottles of drink on board the 9 hour flight without problems, but were now at great risk boarding the short 1 hour flight to BHX. I was of course free to buy exactly the same alcoholic drink at CDG - and carry it on board my flight to BHX. Lesson - buy any alcohol in Cuba, and pack in your suitcase to avoid confiscation, or avoid CDG if at all possible.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  1 May 2009 : by Richard Dalgleish

Customer Rating :  2/5

The only reason to have a long connection time here is that if you don't, you will probably miss it. Very difficult to move from one terminal to another and the fussiest security I have come across. Long queues, indifferent signage, poor lounges but Terminal 2E is nice once you can find it!

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  23 April 2009 : by Tom Kingsway

Customer Rating :  3/5

There is no doubt that this is a poorly run facility. Recently took a flight to Toronto from CDG, and despite having numerous gates unoccupied for 2-3 hours, they thought it best to park a large 400 passenger jet across the tarmac, forcing passengers to take a bus, which took 20 minutes. I can understand if this were a small jet, but when trying to shuttle 400 people across an airport, its too much. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Air France terminals are beautiful, but I cannot say the same about the others. One other issue I have is the number of (or really the lacking of) customs staff to process passengers. It takes so long to go through this process because often times, there are only 2 or 3 customs staff processing hundreds if not thousands of passengers arriving or departing. Security is slow as well. Shops are nice, the duty-free shops have a lot of things to offer, but everything else is just so unpleasant.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  23 April 2009 : by T Mozumder

Customer Rating :  3/5

Flew through CDG terminal 2F in April 2009. The architecture of the terminal building is cool. Access to Paris is also good. The terminal itself was functional.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  9 April 2009 : by D Holland

Customer Rating :  3/5

Flew in and out of this airport this week. Luckily only carrying hand luggage and no transfers. CDG is quirky. The signs, the satellite tunnels, lack of toilets, shops, lack of food. I wouldn't want to be delayed too. On the plus, airside assistance super quick on arrival In Terminal 2B - I found loos with plastic disposal covers. I like the way that security is centred on each small number of gates - eg mine was 10-18. Made it quicker. Beware though there is not much to do once inside. However internet access is 2 euro for about 15 mins and you can play play station as well, but those two facilities might not be available at every set of gates. Word of warning. If you are getting the RER B from Central Paris to Terminal 1, getting off at the Terminal 1 stop will actually leave you at terminal 3 (you don't have a choice) and you will need to get CDGVAL to Terminal 1 but be careful what direction you are going. It will say on the side of the train. (T1 px) (T2 px). I had to cross over to get the right one.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  6 April 2009 : by Nick Biskinis

Customer Rating :  0/5

To R Pointida's point about introducing MAGLEV to Paris CDG. That would be prohibitively expensive. However, I was at a transport conference with SNCF and one official told me that the main priority is to improve the current RER B rail link. They want to give the train dedicated tracks so that the frequency will increase. Also planned is a renovation of the trains with more space for luggage and a more ambient interior. Flanking this is the CDG Express project; which would be a 20 minute High Speed train from Gare de L'Est. Tickets are projected to be 20 Euros single - which is way too expensive, and suspect SNCF see the RER upgrade (called RER+) as the way forward.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  21 March 2009 : by N Waughlock

Customer Rating :  1/5

This is the fourth time I fly via CDG to Rio from Stockholm. I know I should blame myself for continuing to use this worse than third world standard airport. But the flights are 300 euros cheaper and the connection 'theoretically' much faster than any other airline/airport combination from Stockholm to Rio. However, this might have been the last time. One can only marvel at the poor standard of pretty much everything at CDG. The rudest staff (even though I speak french fluently), the longest useless seeming corridors, toilets full of cigarette smoke, grotesque inefficiency, signage stopping suddenly with nowhere to go except 1 mile of false corridor, dirty, loud, not seating at all, no food stalls, poor shopping etc. What I mostly wanted to warn about is that your luggage will be delayed! It happened to me 7 out of 8 total flights (90%!). A rule, not an exception. Talking to staff at both Rio and Stockholm airport, they agree, the amount of lost and delayed out of CDG is shockingly large! It doesnt matter if your lay over is only 1 hour or 4-5, they still will not be able to bring your luggage to the next flight. So do not pack anything you are prepared to loose. Do not pack anything you need within the first 2-3 days of your trip (it takes that long for CDG airport to deliver an identified bag from Paris to Stockholm!!).

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  21 March 2009 : by Carsten Spannhuth

Customer Rating :  3/5

I forgot my mobile phone at the security control and realized this before entering the bus to the plane. An airport employee brought me to the landside lounge (where I initially suspected having left the phone), then to security control, where I obtained my phone. I was then driven individually to the plane (the bus had left in the meantime), arriving just when the last passengers entered it. All involved were quite helpful. Well done & many thanks. With all the negative comments re CDG airport, certainly often justified, the positive experiences also merit to be highlighted from time to time.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  13 March 2009 : by R Pontida

Customer Rating :  2/5

I never used the most recent terminals like S3 but I used parts of Terminal 1 and 2 and they are old. It's not a problem of old painting or a lack of upkeep, you can feel that the whole concept isn't accurate anymore. Everything takes more time than in a modern airport. Luggage claim is extremely slow. Transport to Paris is slow and expensive. Departures on the other side were never of a problem. The only thing I like is the high speed trains which make almost every French city (and, as said, also foreign cities) less than 3 hours of train away. I don't know of any other airport in the world being so "close" to so "distant" cities. If they could just keep the high speed train station, add a maglev to the city centre and build a new terminal completely independent of the existing ones, it'd be a nice airport. But for now, it's just a shame to me.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  10 March 2009 : by Rob Boyce

Customer Rating :  2/5

LHR-CDG-Beijing and return with AF. No problems on the way out, but security ridiculous on the way back despite only being a transfer. Full security check by a member of staff who was only really interested in talking to a colleague, and after this immediately stopped for a manual inspection by seperate staff. Job creation at its worst.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  27 February 2009 : by A Myers

Customer Rating :  1/5

The process to get through security and customs is unorganized and badly executed. The airport is confusing, spread out, in sorry shape. Prices are beyond absurd for the simplest things such as a small bottle of water. Directions are confusing with arrows pointing in every which direction for the same destination. This airport is to be avoided if at all possible.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  27 February 2009 : by Adam Farrell

Customer Rating :  1/5

Having flown through the excellent Terminal 2E last year, I thought that Terminal 2B would be at least better than T1. I was astonished at how BASIC it was. One bar / coffee shop to eat at once through into the departures area. Our BA flight to Heathrow was an hour late, not usually a massive inconvenience but dear God there's nought to do or see. Makes Terminal 2 at Heathrow look palatial. Once into the gate there wasn't even a toilet.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  27 February 2009 : by A Hijmans

Customer Rating :  2/5

Terminal 2 looks like it was recently built but it is drab and, frankly speaking, soul- destroying if you happen to have to spend more than an hour there. There are very little facilities, almost no seats. On the positive side, the TGV station there makes CDG a reasonable (and competitively priced) option for passengers from as far afield as Amsterdam.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  5 February 2009 : by A Floyd

Customer Rating :  1/5

This airport is terrible! I flew from CDG Terminal 2. It was overcrowded, no shops, no seats, and my flight was delayed more than an hour with the screens all showing "on time" and the wrong gate. The gates had three different flights boarding at the same time and the general impression was a noisy, confused, overcrowded standing up wait. Never again!

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  3 February 2009 : by Pierre Fabre

Customer Rating :  1/5

I flew from CDG 2 terminal in mid January and would like to add 3 comments to worsen the very poor opinion I have of Paris airports. The hand luggage check queuing is organized in the most awkward and inefficient manner I ever saw! Because of the snow, some flights were delayed. As there is barely one seat for 5 passengers at the gates, some were getting really upset and I could hear some shouting at the staff and witnessed what looked like riot scenes. The mens toilets were turned into a smoking room, literally! 4 of 5 men smoking there right in the middle, each using urinals as an ashtray! All these problems arise because of the poor architectural design of Paris airports. The terminals are too narrow, there poor connectivity, poor directions, poor luggage transit, poor everything! No matter how recent they are they all suffer from the very same very big mistake: their architects have always given priority to style over functionality.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  14 January 2009 : by J Kemp

Customer Rating :  1/5

I can only echo comments below referring to the snowstorm in Paris on 10 Jan. CDG was absolute bedlam. Terminal E was travel hell. It is perfectly understandable that some flights be cancelled, but one had the impression that there was no plan, no contingency, no nothing really in place to respond to what was essentially a light dusting of snow. Having arrived at 10:30 for a 13:15 flight to Boston, we eventually got to the top of the business class check-in queue for AF at 13:00, at which point the airline/ADP had one counter open as against at least 200 people waiting to check in. Security took another hour, and the flight was finally in the air at 16:30, without one of our bags. The sad thing is that CDG on a good day is just a watered down version of the absolute calamity it was on the 10th. This airport just doesn't work, and would require a complete management overhaul for some positive change to indeed take hold. This is an airport to be avoided if possible - being based in France makes this somewhat difficult, but extreme caution should be exercised if you ever have connect through CDG. My advice - try for a different airport to connect!

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  13 January 2009 : by Nick Biskinis

Customer Rating :  1/5

Another surreal journey into Europe's worst major airport. A few days ago it had been snowing, though not heavily, and as a Category III airport, Paris CDG is meant to be cope with such conditions. Paris CDG shut for 3 hours hours. Ok - fair enough. The Easyjet flight from London Luton arrives. It then took 2 and a half hours from landing to exiting the gate (nearly three times longer than the actual flight from London). One hour of this was spent waiting for the airport to send some aircraft steps to the plane (even though there were several adjacent to us). At one point the pilot said with bewilderment that "air traffic control have asked us to move around a bit for some reason". There is no excuse for such dysfunctional inefficiency - the snow was not heavy and had stopped for several hours by the time we arrived. At baggage reclaim there were no signs on the screen telling people which carousels was for which flight. As it was getting late, the last RER (suburban rail) train to Paris was due to leave soon. Yet the ticket machines did not accept international bank cards - and many English passengers were panicking as the machines didn't accept Euro notes either. None of the ticket offices were open. As i have a French bank account with French card I offered to buy tickets for the others. Except that, the ticket machines weren't accepting French bank cards either. So ticket machines would only accepting Euro coins at an international airport late at night - this made buying a ticket impossible. How the hell are passengers meant to have 10 or more Euros in change at night when all the shops are shut? And if all the ticket machines aren't even accepting French bank cards, why aren't ticket offices staffed? Paris CDG is nothing more than a third world concrete dump. Given how much tax is sunk into it, it seems to squander its subsidies on self-congratulatory adverts whilst the infrastructure rots, and the airport can't even make buying a rail ticket straightforward. I have flown out of airports with worse weather conditions (Toronto, Halifax, Athens) with nothing like the same problems. Paris CDG is likely to overtake London Heathrow as the busiest international airport in the world, but something has to be done about the substandard level of operation. And from experience Paris CDG is much worse than any comparable European airport. It is not in Frances's economic interest to allow this embarrassing mess to continue. Ultimately if the hassle is this bad, people will choose to fly elsewhere.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  31 December 2008 : by A Walther

Customer Rating :  1/5

CDG is one of the worst airports to go through, what more ADP is very proud of itself - instead of paying for commercial adds money should be spent on the airport. The buildings are dysfunctional and even the new ones are already obsolete you can see that the materials used are cheap. Bathrooms, only in the newer parts of T2 do you have OK bathroom otherwise you have 2 toilets per bathroom. In some places of T2 there are no bathroom once you go through security! When you land and have to go through immigration there are 2 booths for 2 B747s!! You're lucky when escalators work because you can forget elevators. Baggage claim estimate time at least an hour. So you can have a 40 mn flight from London, taxi in CDG for another 20 mn and wait an hour for your luggage if you get it.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  31 December 2008 : by J Ken

Customer Rating :  3/5

Had a transfer within Terminal 2E - I must say I was lucky to go through this terminal when not many people were around. There are 2 different sets of gates at 2E which are connected by a shuttle train - it arrives regularly and is quite fast. Had a connecting time of 90 minutes between my flights and made it to the departure gate with an hour to spare. Security screening seemed to take a very long time, though, especially if compared to some other European airports I've been through (LHR, DUB).

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  24 December 2008 : by Timo Rantanen

Customer Rating :  1/5

Paris CDG is the worst airport. This airport is the only one that has successfully lost my luggage on a point-to-point flight. It's a norm that your luggage will not arrive at your destination if you'd changed flights at CDG - but loosing ones luggage on a point-to-point flight has never happened to me before at any airport. I have changed flights at CDG 6 times over the past 3 years. Out of these six times only once did my luggage arrive at the destination with the same flight as I did. CDG is confusing, signage missing or pointing you to wrong direction, the staff is extremely arrogant. The worst thing is that even though the situation has continued for several years - and it's getting worse year after year - the authorities seem not to be doing anything to better the situation.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  20 December 2008 : by Ramon Fretz

Customer Rating :  1/5

When transiting through CDG I always wonder why ADP is considered for the design and construction of other airports around the world while their own in France, particularly CDG in Paris, are absolutely disfunctional. Arrived yesterday from Montreal on Air France not in Terminal 2F - as communicated at check-in - but in Terminal 2E (it is always a lottery where you arrive on AF longhaul flights). Transfer to a Swiss flight to leave from Terminal 2B to Zurich. Shuttle buses to link 2E to 2B - scheduled to leave every 5-10 minutes - never materialized. Security staff contacted at the bus gate insolent to say the least. Confused and uninformed transit passengers. Got to the Swiss gate after an odyssey too late and was redirected to Air France at terminal 2F. One more oddyssey at CDG and one more experience of a disorganized airport with security people that do their job but fail to show respect for travellers. If you have to transfer, connect somewhere else.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  30 November 2008 : by Stephane Marchioni

Customer Rating :  1/5

When will we have a decent airport in Paris?? Whenever you arrive, you will always queue between 5 to 30 min at the police check point even in business class: try the terminal 2E on saturday afternoon with only 2 policemen to check passports of 10 flights passengers! Of course, as policemen are always complaining of their situation, they don't do anything to speed up the process in order to get more manpower without any consideration for the passengers.