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We experienced the Air France Business Class Airport Lounge At Paris CDG Terminal 2F (Schengen) before a flight from Paris to Venice on Air France, which I have also reviewed.
How To Access The Air France Airport Lounge At Paris CDG Terminal 2F
Air France has several business lounges at its home airport in Paris, Charles de Gaulle (CDG). Air France flights to European Schengen Zone countries operate from either Terminal 2F or 2G, with Terminal 2F serving as the main terminal building and Terminal 2G as a satellite terminal connected by an inter-terminal bus.
According to the Air France website you can enjoy complimentary access to their lounges:
For yourself and a guest, if you are traveling in the La Première cabin (which is their business class and includes European business class flights).
For yourself, if you are traveling in the Business cabin with a Standard or Flex fare.
You may also enjoy complimentary access:
For yourself and a guest, if you have Flying Blue Platinum status.
For yourself and a guest, if you have Flying Blue Gold status.
For yourself and a guest if you have SkyTeam Elite Plus status.
Your guests must be with you at the lounge reception desk. They will be allowed in depending on availability and must be traveling on an Air France, KLM, or SkyTeam flight departing on the same day.
Some reports suggest you can pay to access this lounge for €60 EUR, so it’s worth asking at the entrance if you want to enter without a Business Class flight ticket. Lounge membership cards such as Priority Pass are not accepted at Air France business lounges at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Location
Charles De Gaulle Airport is a hotchpotch of rather ugly concrete buildings. It is not a beautiful airport and is a nightmare to navigate, with an extremely slow bus service on offer to connect the Terminals.
We flew into CDG on British Airways and experienced the British Airways Club Europe breakfast on an early flight. Once we had disembarked, we had to transfer from our flight through security (again!) and then took the airport bus to Terminal 2F, which is used by Air France and its SkyTeam partners for all Schengen flight departures.
I have detailed the how to transfer between terminals at Paris CDG in case you’re stuck in a similar situation. The bus takes a long time to get passengers between terminals, so bear that in mind when planning your flights.
Our bus driver drove across the airport tarmac and had to wait for maneuvering planes to drive past. However, after what seemed like hours, we arrived at Terminal 2F, which is weirdly beautiful.
The main building is spherical in design, like a long concrete tube containing shops and lounges. It looks horrible from the outside, but from the inside, the thousands of small window slits which let the light in a speckled fashion is rather stunning. I loved walking through this unusual concrete terminal, and the Air France lounge was similarly magnificent in design.
The Air France business lounge is centrally located in Terminal 2F, used by Air France and its SkyTeam partners for all Schengen flight departures. Unlike navigating the muddle of Terminals at CGD, this lounge is easy to find. Simply follow the “salon/lounge” signs with the Air France logo.
Style & Character
This spectacular Air France lounge opened in August 202. It is a split-level lounge with a lower and upper floor linked by lifts and a gorgeous windy stairwell, one of this lounge’s main features. It had double-height windows to one side with wonderful views over the planes.
The upper level sits on a mezzanine, so it has a balcony edge from which you can look down at the people on the lower level.
This huge atrium gives the lounge an airy feel and makes it a fabulous place to spend time. Because the window at the front of the lounge was curved, it let huge amounts of light into this space, making this lounge bright and sunny. When we were sitting on the upper level, we were bathed in sunshine from above because of the curvature of the window. It was almost as if we were outside.
There is loads of seating in the lounge arranged as cafe tables and sofa seats. Oddly, most of the seats are bolted to the floor, so you can’t move the chairs around, but there is plenty of space throughout the lounge.
At the end of the upper level is a Clarins Spa. I’m not sure if this was a fee-based spa. It didn’t look busy, so I assume it was.
Food & Drink
The food in the lounge is not nearly as good as the food in British Airways Galleries lounges. There are no delicious curries, and the hot dishes are very limited.
For breakfast, there is a small omelet, which is available with two sausages throughout the morning. Otherwise, most of the buffet is cold, with fruit and yogurts on offer earlier in the daytime, with plenty of bread and patisseries to fill up on.
To be honest, the omelet, sausage, fruit, and yogurt breakfast items weren’t particularly appealing, and you needed to go to the corner of the lower level to a special counter that was often unmanned to collect your omelet and sausages. They weren’t laid out on the buffet.
As lunchtime approaches, the staff delivered an extensive array of salad items, ham and salami sandwiches, and a huge counter of meats and hams. You can make up any sort of meat or cheese sandwich from the rolls, and there were saucepans, which should have been full of something hot, but remained empty while we were there, so perhaps some hot food would have appeared eventually.
I almost missed their really good cakes, which were also available from around lunchtime. These are the highlights of the lounge, as the rest of the lunch buffet is OK but not great. Even in the summer, it was cold and unappealing.
I loved their crunchy vanilla cream puff cakes. They also served one of these with the Air France Business Class in-flight meal, and they are delicious. While I loved the lounge setting, the food let it down, with the exception of the vanilla cream puff cakes.
There are beers, wine, and spirits if you fancy an alcoholic beverage as well as coffee machines and large fridges stocked with all the usual suspects: Coke, Diet Coke, water, Minute Maid canned fruit juices, etc. There was a huge choice of drinks. The beer in the fridges was Kronenbourg 1664.
The spirits on offer included vodka and Riccardo. I’m not much of a spirit drinker, so I didn’t recognize most of the bottles, but there was plenty to choose from, and you could make up a proper drink with all the sundries, including lemon, salt, and some hot spicy sauces.
What was massively useful in this lounge was the Air France service representative on the upper floor of the lounge. British Airways had promised to link our luggage from our British Airways flight from London to the Air France flight we were taking down to Venice, but when we watched our air tags, we noticed our luggage seemed to have stopped in the carousel area of the terminal we arrived in.
Feeling rather panicked, I checked our tags with the kind Air France representative at the desk on the upper floor of the lounge, and she told me that our bags had not been linked to our onward flight and would not have been coming with us if we hadn’t checked with her!
Our bags were destined to stay in Paris while we headed to Venice! Thankfully, the Air France lady connected our bags to our ticket, and all was well. It made me appreciate having an Air France help desk in the lounge. I don’t know what we would have done without this lady’s help. We would have arrived in Venice bagless and very sad!
As an aside, we saw several frantic passengers at the luggage carousel in Venice with missing bags, as none of the bags from our British Airways flight appeared to have been rerouted, so it is worth checking your luggage has been tagged properly on flights connecting from British Airways to another airline. The process does not seem to be automatic.
Once we left the lounge, we headed straight to our departure gate for our Air France Flight. Our gate was ridiculously busy, more like a busy train station than an airport, so we were doubly grateful for our lounge access to avoid the crowds.
Conclusion
While this Air France lounge has a fabulous layout and futuristic design (in a good way), the food let it down and wasn’t that appealing, at least when compared to the best British Airways lounges in Terminal 5.
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