Charles de Gaulle – Paris Airport Shuttle:
For our arrival in Paris, I wanted to book a shuttle from Charles de Gaulle Airport to our apartment in the Marais district. It’s been a few years since we’ve travelled to Paris and the Viator shuttle that we would normally use only delivers passengers to hotels and not private addresses. There are so many different shuttle service companies in Paris and a number of them have quite similar company names incorporating the words Paris shuttle. Which one to choose became a dilemma.
Airport Transfers in Paris
There are so many different ways that you can get from Charles de Gaulle Airport to your Paris destination and it all boils down to how much you want to pay and what effort you want to go through to get to your destination. A shared shuttle is definitely more cost-effective than taking a taxi, but I was very surprised at the many scathing comments by some reviewers on TripAdvisor who strongly advise against shuttles. Instead they advise travellers to catch the airport train or to go by taxi, which can end up being quite expensive in the peak hour traffic.
As mentioned above, a few of the Paris shuttle companies have names that are quite similar and it wasn’t clear to me which Paris shuttle company the poor reviews on the TripAdvisor forum were they referring too? Surely they can’t all be bad. But the negative advice was so strong that I began to wonder if I should book a shuttle transfer at all.
With the heavy equipment that we have, we prefer a door-to-door shuttle and in desperation, I made contact with www.paris-shuttle.com. I think we did use them years ago to get to some friends’ apartment and the transfer was perfectly okay.
My Experience with Paris-Shuttle.com
- In my first email to Paris-Shuttle (Paris shuttle with a dash) I asked if they do transfer to a private address and I had an immediate reply from Mr. Jean Orvos the Paris-Shuttle Operator, confirming that they do.
- A couple of weeks later, I emailed Paris-Shuttle again and told them that I was keen to book a transfer, but that I was concerned about reliability, after all the poor reviews I had read on TripAdvisor. Again I got an immediate reply from Mr. Orvos, saying that he appreciated my concern about arriving in a large city like Paris and being stranded, transport-wise. He told me about the history of Paris-Shuttle and how many passengers his company had looked after in its 15 years history and even if all the TripAdvisor reviews were valid, that would only mean that 1 in 10,000 visitors did not find their shuttle driver.
- I was so impressed with the reply and attention that Mr. Orvos gave me that I booked a shared transfer with Paris-Shuttle.
Arriving in Paris
Our flight landed at CDG T1 early and our luggage cleared very quickly and I was expecting to have to wait till 8.30 am which was our appointed pick-up time. We were supposed to phone the shuttle driver exiting the Customs area, but Tony and I were very surprised to see the driver holding up a board with my name on it. As we had to be at our Marais apartment at 10:00 to pick up our keys, Mr. Orvos gave us a private transfer that normally costs much more than the shared shuttle. When we were in the shuttle van, he even rang the driver to make sure that we had been picked up.
Outstanding Service
I must say that our experience with Paris-Shuttle has been nothing but outstanding. Because I was worried about not getting to the apartment on time, Mr. Orvos went all out to make sure that we got there early and gave us a VIP treatment. I would like to clarify that in my communications with Mr. Orvos, I did not mention that we run a website at all. In any case, I didn’t think that makes any difference since these days anyone can put up a comment, especially on forums like TripAdvisor. Mr. Orvos went that extra mile as he wanted to show me that not all shuttle companies are bad, as the TripAdvisor forums seem to suggest.
Another positive experience about booking on-line with Paris-Shuttle is that they have customer service live on-line to answer any queries you may have. I wasn’t sure about how long to allow between my flight landing and the driver pick-up time and I was told to allow 45 minutes.
For our departure from Paris, we will be using Paris-Shuttle again.
Address:
Paris-Shuttle
118-130 Av. Jean Jaures
Paris 75019
www.paris-shuttle.com
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