Perfecting the art of transit

Published Oct 18, 2013

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Paris - Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport is one of the world’s busiest – second only to Heathrow in Europe and the seventh busiest on the planet – handling up to 62 million passengers last year.

It’s a mind boggling figure made even worse by the knowledge that CDG – or Roissy as it is known by the people who work there – effectively consists of three terminals, with terminal two comprising 10 satellites.

There’s an easy way to make sense of this. It’s Air France’s hub and if you fly on Air France, you’ll only use two of the terminals and two of the satellites. And, if you fly in on an SA passport with a Shengen visa, the authorities guarantee you that you won’t take more than 20 minutes to land at Terminal 2F from OR Tambo International and then check in to a regional flight into Europe at Terminal 2E. They achieve this by using circuits, effectively Perspex tunnels, for the most part, and well signposted walkways manned by Aeroport de Paris staff at all turns and possible exits. If you have an EU passport, you can even register it beforehand at parafe.gouv.fr which does away with any physical check whatsoever at border control, cutting down the admin time dramatically.

Whatever your passport, CDG has two check-in streams, orange and green, for domestic, regional and long haul, with orange being the fast track for elite passengers.

Flying out of Paris to the rest of the world, you’ll fly out of one of 2E’s satellite terminals, L and M. M’s the newest, commissioned last year at a cost of E600 million. It’s unlike any terminal intended to handle up to 5 000 passengers at a time. Designed to take on the shopping mall experience of Dubai, M terminal boasts leather chairs in the public (economy) area, boutique shops led by Hermes, Dior and Prada, natural lighting in the retail hall and bubbly water features referencing France’s champagne heritage. There’s also an art gallery, with two exhibitions a year, currently underpinned by acclaimed French sculptor and painter Jean Dubuffet.

It’s all free to passengers, like the recharging points, Playstation banks, Disney kids’ play area, free wifi and internet stations.

For the smokers, there’s even an open air Zen like garden, complementing three live art exhibitions on the wall depicting the Seine running through Paris, in grass and plants.

In the next two years there’ll even be an airside hotel (airside, as opposed to landside, refers to those in no-man’s-land, having passed out of France or unable to enter because they are in transit).

The hapless Mehran Karimi Nasser, who was depicted spending 17 years in stateless limbo in CDG’s Terminal 1 – and inspired the Tom Hanks movie Terminal – would have approved. - Saturday Star

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