Paris CDG Airport

CDG was a stop over to Tel Aviv. We arrived 2.5 hrs prior to boarding. Airport employees are rude and inconsiderate. I asked for help due to poor signage but staff speak limited English. There were only 2 long lines for all airlines one line to check-in and another to check in baggage. 2.5 hrs just spent in lines. Our plane was delayed 30 mins because of the unorganized situation.

Arrived from Philadelphia to hop on a connecting flight to Malaga. We arrived on Delta and the Delta gate was completely unorganized. Because of the lack of English speaking employees as well as the lack of signs we couldn't find the Air Europa terminal and ended up missing our flight. Luckily we finally did find the Air Europa terminal and one of their agents was kind enough to squeeze the seven of us onto their last flight of the day. That being said I will never fly through Paris ever again.

On each occasion that I have used this airport the experience has been disappointing if not downright frustrating. The airport always seems over-crowded the facilities are inadequate and the airport is definitely not clean everywhere. The terminals are also inconsistent: Terminal 2E can be OK especially when leaving on one of the late night flights whereas Terminal 2A is just generally bad.

My experience at CDG was absolutely terrible. I was in Terminal 2 which belongs to Air France. The check-in lines were horrifically long. After you endured check-in you were faced with mayhem at security. The terminal had created three different security lines- one for first class one for Asian flights and one for flights to the US. Of course barely anyone went through the First Class line. Then there were only about 5 flights in the Asian line and about 3 working scanning machines. For the US line there were roughly 12 flights assigned to this line and only one working machine (which actually stopped working by the time I got to it). The line had no rhyme or reason- employees would open up sections of the line to let people into another seemingly faster line only to let them back into the original line when it wasn't actually faster. So I spent about 2.5hrs in that security line. When I got to the scanning machine there were no signs to inform you that every single electronic device had to be taken out of your bag so the machine would go off for every bag that passed through. The walk-through scanner didn't work either. My plane was delayed 1hr because it had to wait on all of the people who were stuck in that horrific security line. It was utterly ridiculous. Nightmarish. I am so discouraged from going back to Paris. Definitely won't be leaving from CDG again. Don't make the same mistake. And if you must get there 6hrs in advance.

Passed through the CDG airport in Paris recently both ways while travelling from Toronto-Bucharest and back. Both ways we were debarked form the air-plane (Air France) on the tarmac and transported by bus to the terminal having to go through the security check although we were not changing the terminal towards our final destination. Coming back from Bucharest we had 2hrs to wait until our flight to Toronto. Once out of the bus bringing us from the aircraft to the terminal once they checked our next flight schedule we were directed to a line towards the security check that has not advanced for the next 90 mins. We were held standing like sardines in a can together with other hundreds of passengers for 90 mins without any explanation. After several attempts to find out what is going on we were finally told that we had to wait here in this very crowded line standing up until all the passengers having less then two hours between their flights are processed first through the security check. In any other airport in the world I travelled through the security check is performed on a first come first served bases and passengers that are either late or have short time between flights are brought to the front of the line and nobody complains about. We barely made it to our flight to Toronto extremely tired and aggravated. I will avoid at all cost ever going through this extremely poorly managed airport.

The most challenging part of this airport are the shuttles from the hotels in the area. They are overcrowded and are very slow. Leave over 1hr for this. Then the airport lines are inefficient and the terminals are confusing. A hard airport to navigate and leave 3 hrs for international flights.

Although some parts of Terminal 2 look fairly new some areas (toilets) are shamefully dirty and/or broken. Moreover the staff in most food shops are incredibly slow and rude. Public transport by train (RER) is too often running late or not running at all dirty and inconvenient for travellers with big bags. This airport is a shame for France.

GVA-CDG-JFK return. My experience in this airport was just awesome: everything worked just smoothly. On the way to New York I had 2.5 hrs connection time (as based on previous reviews I was expecting the worst). That allowed me exploring the terminals 2F ad 2E and I could discover magnificent architecture excellent service nice ground staff and a wide variety of shops. On the way back the flight from JFK was delayed of 2 hrs: because of this fact I just had 50 mins connection time to get from the satellite of terminal 2E to 2F. And I had no problem at all: no queues at immigration fast security control and they managed to efficiently transfer my baggage to the flight to Geneva. For sure I will choose again CDG for my transfer flights to Northern America!

Relatively pleasant and well maintained buildings in the main especially the newer T2 buildings - one issue with it being so spread out is the huge distances you will have to walk to get anywhere. This makes navigating through the airport very tedious and in general there are few "good" places such as bars/restaurants to spend time in mainly just cafes or food courts. But there's plenty of space for sure. The main issue though is the total incompetence of their security set up. It seems that being officious is more important than employing common sense in their checks and for my line of only 10-15 people it took over 30 mins to process - yes 30 mins. Any bag checking resulted in the whole scanning operation stopping whilst they checked the one bag and pointed animatedly at the screen until they uncovered yes a Razor. This happened twice. I travel through many airports and had I not nearly missed my flight because of their ridiculous working methods it would have been laughable how inefficient they were. My usual airport is LHR so you can understand I'm used to queuing etc but personally I would never use CDG if possible - it's simply too maddening.

Departure from Terminal 2B on Air France. Relative few people in the terminal. Distance from train station is relatively long which is a well-known problem at CDG. Terminal was generally cleaner than what I saw during multiple previous experience at CDG. Signage extremely confusing - worst experience of any airport; as a result of poor signage walked additional 150-200 metres and back to my gate area. Staff at checkin generally friendly. Arrival to Terminal 2B on Austrian 2 days later: morning arrival at peak hour. The layout with same-floor arrival/departure is fine when there are no or few passengers; it becomes a disaster during an mix of arriving/departing flights. Arriving passengers had to fight his way through departing ones in the hall and vice versa. Poor signage makes things worse. Huge queuing at the train station to buy tickets with several machines out of order and nobody to help those who are not familiar with the system. Overall I would prefer not to use CDG if possible.