Question/feedback to ULTI team and Ben: has there been a change to CDG departure procedures?

Checked in at 2E ULTI counter this morning, worked fine. The Ulti agent escorted us to the immigration zone, which was helpful given the totally overcrowded zoo that 2E was this morning (I suppose 60-120 minutes wait time depending on which line one was in).

However, rather than bringing us to the front of the line and wait until we could approach the next available immigration agent (this was the case as recently as two weeks ago), he dropped us at the end of the (quite long) line. The rest of the line management was then done by ADP agents, who sent us to another line. Took more than 20 minutes to go through immigration, as opposed to the usual 5 minutes.

Hence my question: ULTI escorts do not escort us to the front of the line anymore?

And, for cases where pax can use PARAFE, wouldn’t it be a good idea to have ULTI escorts drop us at the front of the PARAFE line? Especially the EU PARAFE gates in the SP area are often actually empty, because EU pax are stuck in the long line leading to the PARAFE gates behind non-EU passengers.

In any case, quite disappointing experience, which cost us 20-25 minutes. A step back in ULTI service levels.

For the record: the crew on the flight is nice, I even got my “preferences” (=I didn’t have to ask for a second pillow and got a handwritten card on my seat that is as un-personalised and meaningless as a letter from RATP thanking me for riding their buses) and the chitchat with the crew. But frankly, that “preference” and the small talk where I have to share my travel plans with crew who don’t care anyway and I don’t care about sharing with them is totally useless; whereas a proper escort at immigration would have made a real and measurable difference.

Note to ULTI team: keep on working on that “preference” thing, some passengers care. But before you do that, please make some real efforts to make passing through airports smooth. Especially at your hubs. Being able to avoid waiting lines and therefore able to know ahead of time how much time to leave for going through controls is really very valuable, and a major motivator to requalify for Ultimate.