Done With AF
 

I have used AF since the 1960s. I especially liked the service to the Middle East.

I have tended to stop flying AF because of CDG; it is just too difficult to use, especially when the flights from N. American do remote parking and in the cold and hot one must use those airline stairs from the 1960s.

If the AF pilots want to strike and sink the airline, that is fine with me. However, I am done with AF. I will never fly them again because they are unreliable.

May I ask when is the last time you did use CDG for transiting? I find CDG vastly more user friendly than it used to be (since the big change of a bit over a year ago) and I have not had a remote stand for a long haul flight since the reshuffling of operations to the E and F terminals and the inauguration of S4.

Absolutely. AF ops at CDG are now very easy for the last 2 years. Intra-2F transfers are done in 5-10 min and 2E/2F or 2F/2E are done in 15-30 min maxi. Only transfers to 2G remain "a problem". Bus boarding/deboarding concerns less than 10% if my flights

In my opinion, you need at least 45 min to get to 2F from 2E. The system was improved (I cannot figure out how it could have been worsened), but there are usually very long lines at security, even the Sky Priority one is often very crowded.

I do understand that most posters here have skypriority status (and I do when longhaul as I fly J), but most pax do not. While immigration/transfer procedures have improved for skypriority pax, the question is the experience of the "average" pax that AF needs so much.
Sure the situation has improved for AF transfers. Sure, compared to the worst airports, CDG is not that bad despite the huge amount of walking required when you arrive at many 2E gates. But are these the meaningful comparisons for the typical foreign longhaul pax with freedom to choose?

I would say that like-for-like and on an AF-AF at CDG vs BA-BA at LHR or LH-LH at FRA transfer, the AF-AF is likely the least bad of the three on average.

As others point out, the security queues can be painfully long at peak time, but frankly, I find them worse at LHR even with fast track and the fact that you have to go through security recheck both ways (unless your connection is from a UK domestic airport) is a major pain in the back.

FRA has typically shorter security queues in my experience but they can also be very long in the early morning, and the amount of walking involved can, in my experience be much worse than either LHR or CDG, especially when they involve that horrible tunnel thing.

Of course, transiting at smaller airports (ZRH, MUC, PRG, or even FCO) is most preferable (with the exception of BRU which must be the worst designed airport ever) but among the big three, I think that CDG is doing reasonably well (as Goldorak points out, this is not true if we include 2G but then, equally, things become horrid if you include a T3 transfer at LHR complete with bus boarding mess).

I am still critical of a number of things at CDG, mostly immigration which regularly makes a mockery of priority queues and/or does not enforce differentiation between EU and non-EU passports, leading to people who should be dealt with quickly spending hours behind US, Chinese, Indian, or Nigerian citizens whose immigration screening takes much longer. I find that absolutely exasperating as a lack of organisational enforcement, and why we do not have many more automated immigration gates I really don't understand. But that said, compared to equivalent airport/airlines in size in Europe, I would say that even the average AF-CDG experience is not doing particularly badly.

As NickB would say, we should not generalize from limited personal experiences.
With this caveat in mind, my experiences in the past two years are nil in FRA, around twelve times at LHR T5 and a single arrival/departure at CDG recently. The infuriating part when you are not able to walk fast without pain (me) is the long walking up, down and around at CDG 2E. The other, as you mention, is immigration and at rush hour it is truly bad (I had skypriority but did not help much for the reasons you mentioned). Altogether walking+immigration it did not take that long, say 30 to 40 minutes without transfer to 2F, but highly disorganized and frustrating.
All my transfers at LHR have been a breeze. There is a passport name matching check but it takes no time. Security is more frustrating but I never lost more than 10 minutes. Would, be great if BA/LHR adopted the same policy of no security recheck but that is not going to happen. Last time my arriving and departing flights where in the same sub-terminal (I think T5B) and from gate to gate it took some 10 minutes.

That being said I wish to correct the impression that I may have wrongly given. Transfers AF-AF involving 2E-F is not so bad for a big airport. Now, it is not the weak point of AF. And I am not going to talk about luggage delivery/transfer after what has recently happened at LHR ;)

+1. Immigration is good if you can use Parafes but it is IME often miserable if you have to join a normal queue.
The CDG transit experience nowadays is much better and I certainly prefer transiting at CDG than FRA these days. I barely ever transit at LHR so cannot speak knowledgeably from personal experience although I note that there are frequent complaints about queues at transit security on the BA forum. OTOH, immigration with e-gates and security from landside at T5 has mostly been a straightforward experience for me.

Oh, and regarding bussing at T3 on BA flights, this should now be mostly a thing of the past as most BA flights are now from airbridges at T3 too :) but perhaps what you meant was the T3-T5 bus transit mess, which I have little experience of.

I think you have been very lucky. Indeed if your transfers are from T5B or C to T5B or C and this is known at the time you arrive, then things are great. However, if gate is not known or your transfer involved T5A (the main T5), the security recheck on its own can easily take 30 minutes at peak time (it is quite frequent indeed). Apart from the sheer length it can be very frustrating with the part at the top of the escalator being full and either disembarking the escalator being altogether dangerous, or alternatively, after the situation looks really untenable, agents forcing people to stay at the bottom of the escalators for 10 minutes or so before even letting them up because of congestion.

I agree that in terms of straight arrival, LHR is vastly better than CDG both in terms of immigration and (in relative terms) luggage delivery but for transit, I would say that on the whole, my CDG experiences have been better than my LHR ones.

No I did indeed mean the actual boarding/deboarding. Strangely enough I tend to find the inter-terminal bus at LHR not all that bad although I know many people do not like it. Is the move to contact gates new or a planned change? I had two T3 departures and one T3 arrival in early September (HEL and PRG flights) and all three still invariably used bus gates. The other BA flights that were announced at the time still seemed to be going from the same bus gates area.

Incidentally the bus boarding was a complete mess both times. On the plus side, however, the bus deboarding had a separate bus for Club Europe, which I happened to be flying on that particular flight so that was fairly smooth.

Indeed, I am a lucky guy. In over twelve+ times in the past two years, I never got the escalator problem. I have read on FT that it can happen sometimes, but never experienced it.
I did get my bags lost for 5 days during a recent IT episode. But BA paid for 1,000EUR of badly needed business clothing, so I don't complain too much.

The switchover was, IIRC, 19 September, when a number of *A airlines vacated T3, thereby making gate space available.

Great news!! Thanks for that as the busses were honestly a pain in the back so this will make T3 far more palatable!

I wonder if it might have to do with the times? If you were connecting from HKG, the flights arrive extremely early (is it still 4.55?) and that is probably very empty for connections (when I arrived from NBO very early too it was very smooth). However peak arrival times 7-10am can be an unmitigated disaster... Then it calms down a bit again before the next hub peak etc.

Perhaps it might be worth going via landside at those times.