Extrait du Miami Herald (svp) du 14 august 2007 !
PARIS --
France may be the world's top tourist destination, but the 23 million passengers arriving in Paris this summer have one hurdle to cross before they can get to all that wonderful food and wine: the airport. The International Air Transport Association says the service offered by Aeroports de Paris, which runs Charles de Gaulle and other airports around Paris, is one of the worst in the world. ''Airports range from very good -- Singapore for example -- to the very bad and Paris unfortunately comes in at the bottom end of the spectrum,'' IATA Director Anthony Concil told The Associated Press. He faults the ''public service mentality'' of Aeroports for a nonchalant attitude toward customers -- both passengers and airlines. The airport operator is 68 percent state-owned, and its charges make Charles de Gaulle the seventh-most expensive airport in the world. In the gray concrete underbelly of Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle, Herve Quillet waited for an Aer Lingus flight to Ireland. The real estate agent travels regularly for work, flying several times a month to Dublin; Munich, Germany, and the south of France. ''The queues are always too long and there is never enough people manning the desks, especially at the passport control,'' he said. With its seven satellites each served by four gates, the 1970s-designed terminal ''must be a nightmarish maze'' for the uninitiated, said Quillet Michel-Yves Labbe, president of French travel company Directours, agreed. ''Charles de Gaulle is a disgrace,'' he said. ``The interminable queues, the overcrowding, the complete indifference of the personnel: it's like a third-world airport.'' Newly appointed Tourism Minister Luc Chatel wants Aeroports to improve customer services. On a recent tour around Terminal 2E, one of the airport's newest, he recounted his own experience. ''I've had to wait one hour at a police control, I've had to wait half an hour to collect my luggage and taken a quarter of an hour to get to the plane because I was in a shuttle bus,'' he said. To be fair, Charles de Gaulle is improving. To accommodate the 57 million passengers using the airport in 2006 -- 20 million more than in 1997 -- Pierre Graff, chairman of Aeroports, plans to invest $3.73 billion. In June, President Nicolas Sarkozy opened a glitzy new facility capable of handling up to six Airbus A380 superjumbos simultaneously and as many as 8.5 million passengers a year. The S3 terminal also features ''La Galerie Parisienne'' with more than 49,500 square feet of retail space for fashion, food, perfumes and cosmetics. This summer, as part of its image remake, ADP is also offering free aromatherapy and Korean relaxation classes -- to help relieve the stress.
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