The "Direction de la Police aux Frontières" (head of French Border Police) and Groupe ADP have joined forces to draw up a monthly report on the waiting times encountered by passengers at the various border control points at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly Airports.
General trend observed in April 2024 [1]:
Note: in March, technical problems affected our solution for measuring waiting times at Paris-Charles de Gaulle. In the absence of sufficiently reliable data on the number of occurrences exceeding waiting time thresholds and on the number of passengers affected, itw as decided not to publish a barometer for the month of March.
For the record, the maximum waiting times at the Border Police in airports, targeted by the French Prime Minister - during the inter-ministerial council on tourism on 26th July 2017 -, are 30 minutes for European nationals and 45 minutes for non-Europeans.
- At Paris-Charles de Gaulle: out of nearly 3 million passengers on international flights[2], 84.7% waited less than 10 minutes; 13.4% between 10 and 30 minutes; 1.4% between 30 and 45 minutes and 0.6% more than 45 minutes.
- At Paris-Orly: out of nearly 824,000 passengers on international flights, 91.1% waited less than 10 minutes; 8.6 % between 10 and 30 minutes and 0.3% between 30 and 45 minutes.
Events resulting in waiting times of over 30 minutes [3]:
At Paris-Charles de Gaulle /
Week 14: 12 events impacting around 4,180 passengers, with an average waiting time of 44 minutes.
Week 15: 40 events impacting around 13,915 passengers, with an average waiting time of 48 minutes.
Week 16: 13 events impacting around 3,530 passengers, with an average waiting time of 46 minutes.
Week 17: 28 events impacting around 10,640 passengers, with an average time of 43 minutes.
At Paris-Orly /
Week 14: 8 events impacting around 870 passengers, with an average waiting time of 42 minutes.
Week 15: 8 events impacting around 880 passengers, with an average waiting time of 39 minutes.
Week 16: 1 event impacting around 100 passengers, with an average waiting time of 39 minutes.
Week 17: 7 events impacting around 800 passengers, with an average waiting time of 37 minutes.
Focus on some events:
- Sunday, April 14th, departures at Terminal 1 at Paris-Charles de Gaulle, between 10:00am and 12:00am, some 900 passengers waited for up to 70 minutes at departures from Terminal 1 at Paris-Charles de Gaulle. The reinforcements deployed to support the border police officers initially mobilized were finally able to absorb the flow of passengers during this peak period.
Against a backdrop of very heavy traffic linked to the school vacations, the decision has been made to prioritize a maximum number of police officers at the arrivals borders of Terminal 2E, where more than 2,500 passengers arrived during the same time slot between 10:00 and 12:00.
Paris Aéroport's preventive measures were put in place, including the broadcasting of announcements explaining the delays, the mobilization of reception staff to assist passengers in need, and the distribution of bottled water.
- On Wednesday April 24, between 8:00 and 10:30 am, arrivals at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2E were affected by the testing of a new circuit for international passengers in preparation for the JOP2024 and by major technical malfunctions in the PARAFE airlocks, which prevented the smooth processing of the large number of passengers during this peak period.
All border control operations were affected, with over 2,000 passengers waiting up to 1 hour.
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[1] In February 2024: at Paris-Charles de Gaulle, out of nearly 2.3 million international passengeminutes, 0.7% between 30 and 45 minutes, and 0.2% more than 45 minutes. At Paris-Orly, out of nearly 868,000 international passengers, 92.2% waited less than 10 minutes, 7.4% between 10 and 30 minutes, 0.3% between 30 and 45 minutes and less than 0.1% more than 45 minutes.
[2]Passengers who have crossed a border on departure, on connection or on arrival at Paris-Charles de Gaulle or Paris-Orly are taken into account (not therefore passengers on domestic or Schengen flights).
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Update on Border Police reinforcements and the PARAFE airlock deployment program Recruitment for the DNPAF (Direction Nationale de la Police aux Frontières), which began last February, was completed at the end of April, and will result in the arrival of around 200 new border guards, who will reinforce the workforce at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. |
Methodology: real time data from counting sensors
Since 2019, Groupe ADP has deployed tools to monitor and control passenger flows and waiting times. In particular, sensors allowing the number of passengers to be counted in real time in a queue have been deployed to equip the border crossing and safety control areas of Paris Airports.
This is a real-time measurement tool that is automatically updated every five seconds. It counts the number of passengers in a queue by measuring how long the last person to leave the queue has been waiting. Between 80 and 200 sensors are needed to cover an area, depending on its size.
The data is fed into an operational performance monitoring tool that analyses what has happened in an operational day. It is the data extracted from these sensors that is used to set up this barometer.
