We have five hours to stay in paris before travelling to our destination. Any suggestion? is it worth leaving the airport?
Thanks in advance.

Are you at CDG for both flights?

CDG can be a pretty confusing and disorganized airport so you really don't have enough time to do much/anything. It is very possible your plane will park away from a gate and they will bus you to the terminal. then there is immigration, then about an hour into town, and hour back and finally a security queue.

If your lay over was 7 hours or more I'd say go for it but w/ just 5 hours, just get a good book, have a meal, shop at the airport.

Forget it ... too short time.

seeall,

Two years ago we had a similar situation. There were four of us and all of our bags were checked through to our next destination. We got all of our boarding passes, etc. for our connecting flight and then took a cab into Paris (about a 1/2 hour ride). We had a great lunch at Guy Savoy (a 2 1/2 hour lunch!), another 1/2 hour cab ride back to CDG, and had an hour to get through security and board our next flight.

We didn't have any problems and it was a great way to spend the time!

Good luck!

seeall,

You'll need to find out a coupld of things. Are you flying from US or connecting within EU? If the former, you're more likely to face longer queue at passport control as I assume you'll be travelling with more non-EU passengers.
Secondly, will you be able to check your luggages through, and get a boarding pass for the connecting flight? If so, you can avoid having to queue in again for checking in.

Finally, how much "free time" you'll have will depend on if your arriving flight lands on time. You can get a quick ride via taxi (if it's not morning/late afternoon rush hour), or RER (if you don't have to queue at RER ticket counter).

I think you might be able to squeeze 1 hr or so. 2hr in optimal condition. So lunch is a possibility, if you find a restaurant where the service won't be too slow.

Hi see,

I estimate that, with getting out of CDG, getting to/from Paris and having to go back through security, you will have about an hour in Paris.

This is better than a day at CDG.

You can take the RER B line from CDG 2 TGV stop to St. Michel. It takes 40 min.

See www.ratp.fr

Enjoy your view of Paris.

We had this same decision 2 months ago. We flew into CDG from Newark around 11am in the morning and had a flight out to Athens at around 3:30 if I remember correctly. After advice from this board we relaxed in the airport and didn't venture into Paris. As we were flying to Athens I saw that the traffic from the airport into Paris was SOLID almost the entire way. We were very glad that we hadn't added the stress of that traffic to the beginning of our trip.

Thank you all for your replies.