Paris’ three airports,Charles de Gaulle (CDG), Orly and LeBourget, which are being operated by Aeroports de Paris (ADP), have been criticised by the Cour des Comptes for increasing airport tax without in turn offering better services to passengers.
The Cour des Comptes is an official French auditing body. The report said that travellers struggle to find their way in the terminals, little information is given to them and waiting queues are poorly managed. It added that passport controls at the airports are poorly supervised during peak times as are bus transfers to planes.
After four recent transfers at CDG, we whole heartedly agree with the finding sand we could add that among European airports there is a total lack of uniformity in security rules.
This regularly leads to bizarre situations where, for instance, in the UK a pairof scissors is allowed on board the aircraft, while in Paris the same pair of scissors is confiscated, further adding to the security hassles that are, to be fair, rampant at allEuropean airports.
Another example of incompetence during a recent transfer at CGD was an ADP tyrant who started yelling at a groupof Korean tourists who, instead of carrying their bags along the poorly managed queues, had parked their belongings at the front of the queue.
That clearly was against the rules and the tyrant ordered the totally puzzled Koreans – in French – to keep the bags with them.
When the mostly elderly tourists didn’t immediately comprehend the strange instructions barked at them, the tyran talerted a female airport police officer,who – again in French -repeated the instructions.
After embarrassed fellow passengerswaiting in the same queue explained the odd ADP security rules, the group finally understood.
As far as we are concerned, the Courdes Comptes report has been missing acouple of glaring deficiencies at the three Paris airports, which together with London Heathrow, are places you don’t want to avoid including in your itinerary.