Airport meet and greet: what it actually includes, and when it earns its cost

Meet and greet means your chauffeur parks, walks into the terminal, and is standing at the arrivals exit with a name board when you come through. They take the luggage from the trolley and walk you to the car. That is how our airport transfers work at Charles de Gaulle, Orly and Le Bourget.

What it too often means in practice is a text message telling you to find a car at a pickup point, which is not the same thing at all and should not be priced as if it were.

The same protocol applies at the railway stations, where arrivals by Eurostar at Gare du Nord or by TGV at Gare de Lyon are met on the platform side rather than on the street. See our train station transfers.

Which exit, precisely? Charles de Gaulle has several terminals, and Terminal 2 alone has halls A through F. A company that cannot tell you where your chauffeur will stand has not looked up your flight.

How much waiting is included? Sixty minutes on an international arrival is the reasonable standard, counted from the actual landing rather than the scheduled one. Thirty is workable on a domestic flight. Anything shorter means you will be paying a supplement at the moment you are least able to argue.

What happens if the flight is delayed? The answer should be nothing at all. A company that tracks flights properly moves the pickup automatically. If the answer involves you calling them, keep looking.

With children, because the twenty minutes spent finding a car park with a pushchair and a tired four-year-old is the worst part of the whole journey.

With real luggage, for the obvious reason, and particularly with ski or golf equipment where the walk to a remote car park is long. That is also where the car matters: four hold cases and a pushchair belong in a V-Class, not a saloon boot.

On a first visit, where an unfamiliar airport in an unfamiliar language after a flight is exactly when a name board with your own name on it is worth something.

And on long-haul arrivals, where the value is not logistical but mental. Ninety seconds after the doors open you are walking behind someone who is carrying your bags, and there is nothing left to work out.

If you travel to Paris often, know Charles de Gaulle well, carry only a cabin bag and land at a quiet hour, kerbside pickup is cheaper and entirely sensible. We offer it, and we say so.

The honest position is that meet and greet is worth paying for perhaps two thirds of the time. The rest of the time it is a comfort rather than a necessity, and you should book it knowing which of the two you are buying. If you are also weighing the train or the taxi rank, our comparison of the ways from Charles de Gaulle into Paris sets out the fares and the real journey times.