Transfer in CDG - claim our baggage & do passport control??
 

We are planning a trip to France in the spring. We are looking at flying from the US to Charles de Gaulle and then transferring to a flight to Bordeaux. The layover time would be about 2 hrs and I'm wondering if it will be enough time. Do folks know if we would have to claim all our baggage and go through passport/customs in CDG, or could we just transfer and do that in Bordeaux? Flights would all be Air France.

Assuming you are booking USA-Bordeaux then you pass through immigration at CDG, your luggage will be checked through and you will go through customs at Bordeaux

Ok thank you - yes we would book one ticket from US to Bordeaux. So as long as passport control isn't too bad it sounds like we should be ok. I assume we'll have to transfer terminals but I forget how that works at CDG.

Just about every Air France flight is in terminal 2, but since it has 6 major modules, it is sometimes a long walk.

It is highly unlikely that there will even be a customs officer on duty when you arrive in Bordeaux, and even if there is one, you'll probably just walk past him.

And how are you getting back to the US? We flew from CDG to SFO yesterday on AF. It took us 1 1/4 hrs from being dropped off at the 2E terminal to when we arrived at the gate M complex where are flight departed from.

All check-in is automated. You go to a kiosk & print your boarding pass and the long sticky paper thing you put around your luggage for identification - retaining the peal-off part for your identification in case your bags are lost. Then you go to the former check-in desk, load your bags on the conveyor, scan your bar code yourself - and off your bag go.

Then you go to passport-exit control. This is manual and by far the most time-consuming event. It's manual and very few "desks" were "open".

Then you might take a "petite-train" to your boarding area (ours was M). Then you go through security check - which was real quick.

At boarding time, instead of standing in a long line and handing your boarding pass to the clerk, and the clerk scans the pass, then hands it back to you - you instead scan the pass yourself. There were many more scanners available than there were with the clerk-operated process. Our 560 passenger plane was fully loaded with passengers 20 mins before departure.

Stu Dudley

PAF (police aux frontières, immigration) are really a nuisance. I mean the queues, especially during rush hours (arriving in CDG E, 6am).
Air France minimum connecting time is 1 hour. So 2 hours gives You ample time to connect from 2E (where You come from US) to 2F (Bordeaux)as You dont have to collect your bag. If your flight is delayed but connection still doable, AF staff may be waiting for You at aircraft door to help You clear immigration. If your flight is heavily delayed, You are rerouted on the Next flight (roughly ever 2h for Bordeaux, I think)

StuDudley, I'm curious about the self check-in. If the passenger prints out the luggage tag, puts it on the suitcase and then on to the conveyor belt, does that mean no one is checking the weight? I still remember having to rearrange our bags right there at the desk in order to get them all below the max weight.

Will be traveling on American in December. Do they all have this automated system?

Thanks

I accompanied a friend to the airport last month and another friend the month before for a long haul Air France flight and the passengers all had to wait for an agent to drop off their bags. It is true that the step before that entails using the machine to get boarding pass and baggage tags automatically.

tracilee,

The bag is weighted when you put it on the belt. If it is too heavy, it just wont go

As rouelan stated - you put the bag on the roller section that has a weight measuring device under it. After you scan it - I assume that a buzzer will go off or the bag just wont move if it is overweight.

Stu Dudley

Thanks all! Stu, we are not yet sure if we'll return from Bordeaux via Paris to the US, or whether we will simply return straight from Paris. That is good information about the check-in process, thank you!

Thanks for the explanation on weighing the bags rouelan and Stu!