Tuesday, April 17, 2012

car hire pick up and dropoff paris airport difficult?

we will be flying in and out of paris mid oct to mid november after 1 week in paris want to drive or train to maybe strasbourg then down to italy, week in provonce and eventually return car.Can anyone help me with the best way of doing this .How difficult is the departure and arival with hire car in and out of the airport?Will have 2 kids so trying to cut down on the stress.Would we be best to return car outskirts of paris and train to airport on departure?






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If you are traveling in and out of CDG, this is perhaps one of the easiest airports to pickup and dropoff a car rental in the world. Shuttle buses to rental locations are not needed as the rental offices are a short walk either from customs or to airline check-in counters. If you are staying in Paris upon your arrival, you will not need a car rental for this portion of your trip. You can pickup a car in Paris when leaving and drop it off at the airport on your return.





Train/TGV connections are very easy at the airport as well.





Once you have decided upon your exact itinerary, the next step whould be to determine transportation costs. One possibility is to stay in Paris for 1 week, take the TGV to Strasbourg, rent a car there to continue your vacation. While a car give you the greatest flexibility, taking it into Italy will cost you a rental premium (accident risk is increased).





To obtain information about car rentals:





www.autoeurope.com



www.avis.com





For train travel:





http://www.voyages-sncf.com/




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CDG is a good airport to pick up a hire car from, and even quite a good airport to leave from to drive to Strasbourg. Getting back from Italy is quite straighforward, and not TOO badly signposted. There is a service station about 5km from the airport to refuel before you drop the car off. The only problem is one or two places where motorways merge and de-merge in a short space, causing raised pulse rated and palpitations in most people not used to the continental way of changing lanes.





Allow yourself plenty of time (at least an hour more than Mappy says) for the 50km or so nearest the airport, traffic can be incredibly slow no matter the time of day.





Dropping off the car at CDG requires concentration as it is too easy to find yourself in the taxi park (I missed one little sign, that%26#39;s all it takes)




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We had a difficult time trying to return our rental car to Terminal 1 at CDG. I think it took us 45 minutes of driving around before we just decided to drop it off at Terminal 2 and take the free bus to Terminal 1.





The problem we had was the direction of the arrow on the sign to go to the Terminal 1 car return! Other than that it was pretty easy! The luggage carts are free and we found many at the car return area.





You would think we would learn as it is the umpt tweenth time we have returned rental cars at CDG!!!





We stayed two nights before we left at a little town 5 km Goussainville, Val d%26#39;Oise from CDG. ( Astrix Park is close for the kids to go to.)There are many close hotels that offer a chance to tour that area the day before leaving-- that are close to sites and to the airport.





The time before we stayed near Senlis and toured that area.





Also if you pick car rental up in or near Paris and return to the airport there is not an airport fee charged. At least that is what we have experenced!




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Parc Asterix www.parcasterix.fr/ is definitely a hit with kids, but before getting their hopes up, it appears that it closes for the season on 15th October. The alternative would be Disney .....



We%26#39;ve never tried to deal with hire cars at CDG, but have had heated discussions on the autoroutes nearby - that%26#39;s a while ago though and there have been some suggestions on TA that hire cars with SatNav can be worthwhile ;-)




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