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.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  23 November 2008 : by Kevin Winterborne

Customer Rating :  1/5

Just flew into CDG from Bangkok. Arrived at 7 in the morning. Had to transfer from Terminal 1 to 2A. No signs, no agents. Not even 1 flight monitor showing where my next flight was. We basically had to guess. My itinerary listed my next flight's terminal, but I don't always trust it, and as we all know is subject to change. There was one bank of monitors but it was off! We went to take a shuttle bus and were met by a very long line that extended up a very narrow staircase. We waited about 1/2 hour for the bus. Once we got on the bus we began an excruciatingly slow drive to every terminal. It took another 40 minutes to get to our terminal. The terminals are devoid of signs and the people are rude. We went to the Continental transfer desk, got our ticket then waited in another long line for security. Then we went to the gate, had to go up stairs and down the other side, around a restaurant to get to the gate. It is insane. I wanted to buy some medicine. Not one of the stores carried meds, not even aspirin. I bought a small bottle of tea for the whopping price of 4 dollars (US). At the gate everyone was laughing at the staff members - they had no idea what they were doing. The boarding was delayed, but the sign didn't indicate this. It still showed on time. No announcements, no information, but at least three checks of my passport and I was asked by three different people if anyone packed my bags for me. I will add this airport to my list of airports to avoid.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  19 November 2008 : by S Bryant

Customer Rating :  1/5

Arrived in after an overnight flight from West Africa in transit to the UK and made the connection - just. The airport doesn't function efficiently with poor or non-existent signs, very long queues to go through the transit security check, repeat checking of passports and tickets - one thorough check should be enough. The officials were surly; they are probably hassled themselves because of understaffing, lack of scanners and inefficient practices. On top of this the food and drink prices are extortionate to the captive clientele. CDG is probably the worst airport in Western Europe, and one of the worst in the world that I've travelled through. If other airports such as Amsterdam, Singapore and Heathrow can get these things right, why not Paris? I very rarely complain like this, I'm only writing to add my voice to many others in the hope that CDG officials read this site and seek to improve what they offer. Air France is a good airline, badly let down by their major hub airport.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  15 November 2008 : by K Thorne

Customer Rating :  1/5

Just had another disastrous experience flying in and out of Charles de Gaulle. This time, it was Terminal 1, which is a nightmare of spiralling layout, lack of proper signposting, and dragging or carrying luggage upwards on ramps. If possible, check in online, or at least find out which area your airline is checking in at, these are on several floors and no signs show you what, where and when. Departure gates require you to be elevated through plastic tubes, and then you continue spiralling around trying to find the satellite terminal for your gate. Leave plenty of time for getting to the satellite terminals, as these require some walking and then a swift climb on Undulating walkways. Neither when I left, nor when I came back, was the outgoing walkway operating, and so passengers had to carry their belongings up a fairly steep staircase. There are no elevators, but more importantly, also no signs or an option to call for assistance before you actually get to the staircase. In terms of customer service, it would be helpful if one staff could have stood by the stairs and offered help or at least apologized for the inconvenience.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  6 November 2008 : by R Russell

Customer Rating :  1/5

What a nightmare! Arrived at 9:30 for 12:30 flight to Dulles. Barely made the flight. One long line after another doing the same thing over again. Employee attitude surly at best. Have to ask a hundred different people in order to find anything. One of the most inefficient airports I have ever used. Built to impress but not to be functional. What little food was overpriced and God help you if you need a bathroom. Avoid this airport if you can.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  6 November 2008 : by Joe Bailey

Customer Rating :  1/5

T2 is average, T1 is an absolute shocker. T2's connections are fine. T1's are frankly ludicrous. It is dumpy, ugly, claustrophobic, gimicky, dated confusing with bad check in, bad landside facilities, worse airside facilities, Unbelievably inefficient Passport control, stupid security arrangements, and pathetic gate arrangements - I cannot think of a worse organised airport with the possible exception of LAX. CDG1 makes Heathrow look good.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  18 October 2008 : by O Beyr

Customer Rating :  2/5

CDG is one of the worst airports in the European Union. I have experienced this airport in most of its terminals and it is always the same horrific scene: Congestion meets disorganisation and chaos. For me it is especially hard to understand why the new terminals seem to suffer from a wrong conceptual design: Confusing signage and numbering, too small areas for security controls, mile long walks to the baggage claim, people queuing up block escalators and corridors. Make sure to plan some extra time for checking in and transfers and always keep cool!

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  11 October 2008 : by P Ross

Customer Rating :  2/5

Transit from 2F to 2E on a Tuesday morning. A very long walk! It was very hard to find a bathroom on the way but eventually found one. When got to 2E, had to go through security - an absolute nightmare! The line was only for half of the terminal, but was very long and extremely disorganized. One line was for first class, which seemed to work okay, but the economy line hardly moved!! There were about 120 people in line in front of me and it took almost an hour to get through the line! A supervisor came at one point and had someone reorganize the lines but it did not seem to get much better. Then someone came and directed about 20 people in front of me into the first class line and then later directed people behind me into that line!! Once arriving at the xray machine, it was more evident why the line barely moved - disinterested security employees who did not care much about organization. They would not allow you to place your items into the machine until they first re- checked your tickets (just previously checked) and then you had to point out what was yours and then they would place your tickets/passport into one of the bins and then you could walk through! Taken together with the very poor options to find something to eat in the terminal (just a convenience type place with premade sandwiches), it was a much worse transit experience than I had previously encountered (Heathrow, Munich, Amsterdam, Frankfurt). I will not transit through CDG again if I have a choice.

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  11 October 2008 : by David Chown

Customer Rating :  2/5

I agree with descriptions that CDG falls far short of an international hub. In the first week of Oct 2008 en route Bordeaux-Malaga, we had to transfer between Terminals 2F and 2D, which is a very long walk, and the reverse on our trip back. There is allegedly a shuttle bus, but following the signs just leaves you outside the building with no further indication as to the bus-stop. Transfering Terminals takes you outside the security area, so you have to go through the lengthy security checks again, which is irritating. Although our flights were on full-size Air France and Air Europa aircraft, we had to board by buses. Since this involved leaving the bus in the rain and climbing metal stairs back into the boarding ramp from the terminal, the point was a total mystery!

PARIS CDG AIRPORT review :  7 October 2008 : by L Day

Customer Rating :  2/5

Completely diabolical. We got off the plane and then had to walk for miles and miles and miles before we finally got to the customs and immigration - which was a slow and tedious process. Departure arrived at the Terminal 2 TGV station in the afternoon - lift was not working so we had to cart our heavy suitcases up the stairs, then got lost in the airport as all signage was confusing and eventually we found their little airport train which took us to the terminal for Singapore Airlines. Upon arriving at the SIA check in desk, massive queues with no organisation as to where we were meant to be waiting - they just told everyone to stand in the middle of the airport- causing a disruption to people walking through the area. Check in finally opened - slow again, people had no idea what they were doing. After that we went through immigration to get to the actual terminal area - again no organisation as to where queue's were meant to be going. Terminal was shoddy - no ATMs at all so I was unable to do duty free shopping, only one place to eat, overpriced, little space for sitting.