Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Planes can land there . Planes can leave again . |
| Disadvantages: |
Total chaos trying to navigate the airport . The moving walkways are a real danger to your health . Lack of information . Not enough multi - language speakers working there . The place is in need of some real modernising . The check - in desks need some real |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
no |
Having never been in Charles de Gaulle airport before & expecting it to be like most other airports, my family & I looked forward to our new experience.
We flew from Belfast International Airport – Aldergrove, to London Heathrow & then transferred to our flight to Charles de Gaulle. Our flights with British Midlands International were all on time & rather uneventful, which was nice & we arrived at Charles de Gaulle on time. Things were looking good & we were looking forward to getting a taxi to our hotel.
(I had visited the CDG Airport website to familiarise myself with the layout, which would speed up our journey to the hotel once we located our luggage. The website was great & I was pretty confident that I could navigate the airport easily! .. Once there, things can quickly change!)
Once the BMI flight landed & we disembarked, we made our way through the tunnels (perspex ones) to try to find our luggage. We made our way slowly, but surely, watching the various signs to where we had been informed our luggage would appear on one of the conveyor belts (Number 34). After exiting the terminal building, I began to think that a mistake had been made somewhere & had a horrible vision of our luggage being somewhere else. I was not alone here as most of the passengers from our flight were wondering the same thing as we looked for belt number 34. Dorothy had an easier time locating the Emerald City when she ventured into the Land of Oz than we did were having finding our luggage!
Determined that we would reclaim our baggage I made my way back into the terminal building (followed by the rest of the flight passengers) & then slowly retraced my steps along the yellow brick road until I got back to my starting point. I had barged back through a one-way system & realistically shouldn’t have been able to re-enter the arrivals section, but I did (& so did the others!). I had asked for some help from a couple of rather relaxed looking gendarmes along the way, but they just gave me a rather bemused look & then walked away. Undeterred I looked again at the monitor that had pointed us to belt number 34 it still said number 34. Realising that there must have been some mistake I began wondering where the BMI info desk was, but then to my surprise the info on the monitor changed! The belt number changed from 34 to 24! I had noticed number 24 on my travels & set off to find it again & see if our luggage was there. Within a short space of time & several circles of the terminal, I found belt 24! Lo & behold, our luggage started to miraculously appear in front of our eyes on this belt & that was the best moment that I had had in this damn airport! Luggage on a trolley, I set off to find the rest of my family who were waiting at the terminal exit.
Next was to grab a taxi (minibus type) to take us to our hotel. Again, this was easier said than done, because the moment I exited the terminal with our luggage we were set upon by taxi touts who wanted a few quid quickly! After beating off a load of touts it was time to try to find a real taxi driver with a good sized taxi. After another short space of time & a few more touts I found the perfect taxi! Luckily the driver spoke reasonable English & I gave him the hotel address & we agreed a price for the journey. (I had previously e-mailed the hotel to get an idea of the fare from the airport to the hotel, so that I wouldn’t be too much out of pocket!). 20 minutes later, we arrived at the hotel & I paid the agreed fare.
(With the airport farce behind us we enjoyed our holidays.)
We were not really looking forward to returning to the airport, but the day of our departure came & we got a taxi from the hotel to the airport. Once at the terminal building we got our luggage onto a trolley & then it was time to find the BMI check-in desks. It took about 10 minutes & several complete laps of the terminal before we noticed the BMI desks down a type of lane in the terminal. There was a large crowd gathered there so I left my wife & kids with the luggage trolley whilst I went to see if this was indeed the check-in desk for our flight & I also wanted to find out what time we could check in at. Eventually my turn came & I asked my questions & was happy that it was the right place to check in, but bemused that I could check in there & then! Basically, regardless of the time of your flight, you could check in when you wanted to. All the luggage from all the flights operated by BMI were checked in at the same desks, which made me wonder how they managed to get the right luggage to the right flight! Either way, I went back to get my family & luggage & we checked in.
Not sure how to feel about the luggage system, we left the check-in desks & made our way to the departures area. Soon, we came to the adventure training area of the airport (the moving walkway!) which looked rather daunting. The walkway was flat to start with, but soon we noticed the first of the hills that we were to encounter! The walkway moved us closer & closer to the hill & then it suddenly started to go up, which is where some people toppled over as they lost their balance. After regaining composure & balance we thought that we would be on the flat again, but that soon proved wrong as we suddenly started to go downhill & again people lost the balance & some toppled over. This went on for another few goes, until we finally got to the flat again & then the end of the adventure training area! Once off the conveyor belt of doom, we regained composure & balance for the final time & thanked our lucky stars that no one had really hurt themselves!
As we found the appropriate seating area for our flight (well, for BMI anyway!), the kids soon quickly found ways of occupying themselves. As there was time to spare (a few hours), I decided to have a look at our transfer boarding passes for the flight from Heathrow to Aldergrove. This is when I noticed a really nasty surprise! The check-in lady had booked us into the flight OK, but she had just seated us all over the plane, which was no good to us at all! I noticed that we were in 6 different rows of seats, which were all over the place. There’s no way that I was letting my kids (1 x 7, 2 x 8 & 1 x 9) be seated anywhere but with my wife & I! Rather annoyed I went to the BMI desk in the departures where I pointed out this grave error to the supervisor there. He took the transfer boarding passes & told me to wait till he called me back again. 30 minutes later the guy called me over & gave me new boarding passes, which seated us in one row. He apologised for the previous error, but couldn’t explain the clerk’s lack of attention to the seating of a family. The kids got a few bits & bobs from the little shop with the compliments of BMI & my wife & I sighed a huge sigh of relief!
After that little drama, we got on our flight (delayed by an hour by some dipstick leaving his luggage where he shouldn’t have) & thankfully left the mishap of an airport behind us!
Charles de Gaulle airport might have been the in thing when it was designed & built, but it is totally unacceptable in this present day! The circular terminal buildings are like polo mints/tyres & the perspex walkways to the plane are rather daft looking. There’s a total lack of information anywhere in the airport & finding things is another thing! Then, you get pestered by taxi touts who want to make a quick earner. If you are caught in the car with a taxi tout you will be arrested too! If at all possible … avoid having to use Charles de Gaulle airport! We flew into Paris on July 26th 2001 & left again on August 1st 2001)
Marks out of 10 would have to be 2! & that’s being rather generous at best.
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