Air France Help
 

I'm am starting to work on airfare to Provence for a week stay in Sept. I'm an avid Fodorite. But am, still a bit stumped as to how to do this best - fast train from Paris southward or take a comuter train to Marseille/Nice. I saw on an Air France site (in French, that I understand just a bit) it indicated that one could fly from 53E and that is worth looking into. Problem is - how do I get a French Air France site, not the American one and then get a translated web site, so I can figure this out. We're doing a week in Luberon and a week in Paris. Thank you for any insight.

I can't imagine anyone would want to take the commuter train to Marseilles if you mean all the way from Paris. I'd take the TGV or fly.

AF French site is www.airfrance.fr

If you are starting to look for airfare, just go to the Air France web site, click USA and search for flights from whatever airport you leave from to Marseille or Nice. It will be in English. AF code shares with Delta so you may get Delta or Air France flights.

We always found this method cheaper and easier than flying into CDG and taking the train. Marseille is very convenient to the Luberon. You can call Paris a stop over so the airfare is round trip to Marseille.

Do as Judy has said. I fly Delta/AF all the time. Can use FF if you have them for round trip tickets to/from Marseille. Check your luggage straight to Marseille. You will make a connection in CDG. Rental car pickup very convenient in Marseille. It is a nice, small little airport. You will find it convenient to drive wherever from there..Enjoy....

Air France does force some choices upon you on their website -- for example, once you pick your country, you can only choose departures within it, as I recall, or at least close. For example, you can't pick the US and then find a ticket from Paris to somewhere.

You can on the French site, of course, as noted above. The French site is in French, that's it, you can't get the French site in English.

They assume the language by the country you say you are in on www.airfrance.com It's a fairly reasonable assumption, but if you did actually live in France and couldn't read French, you'd be in big trouble (not that AF would care, ha ha).

So, the tricky part is to fool Air France. Say you are in the UK -- voila, you get a website in English, but miraculously can put in Paris as a departure point because it's not far from the UK. The prices appear to be direct translations from the French site, no difference. On the UK site it shows a one-way fare of 38 GBP for CDG-MRS on 9/4/07, whereas on the French site it is 57 euro, exactly the same in USD.

I have a new tip, I just checked Belgium, and it is best as it defaults to English but lets you choose French/Dutch if you wish -- and they do have cheaper prices. Only 20 euro for that same fare, unless I did something wrong.

Now buying it may be another story, I didn't try -- like if you can't buy on the Belgium website without a Belgium credit card, don't know. If so, you will probably have to call AF to book such a ticket.

However, I really do agree that if you are flying into Paris, on AF, you should not book a separate ticket, just add it onto that ticket, to get the cheapest price, which may not even be much of anything (I frequently find add-on cities are the same price as the route to Paris, or less than $50 more).

Why not try flying into Lyon instead of Paris? We've always done that for our trips to southern France and had no problem scheduling from Boston to London or Munich then on to Lyon. Pleasant trip and we don't waste a day in France traveling from Paris to the south.

Sorry didn't complete my post. It's a lot easier to have the trip ticketed as a whole rather than two seperate tickets, in case you get delayed. The airline will just reschedule you. The bonus is our bags were checked through from Boston to Lyon.