Paris Taxis - Fixed Rates 55/50 Euros? - Not Quite.

How many passengers were there? If there were more than 4 passengers, you would have been charged 4€ in addition to the flat fee.
If you called G7 Taxis and reserved yourself, there would have been a 7€ charge added to the flat fee for the reservation.
G7 Taxis always arrive a little early, so it wouldn't be unusual if he was already parked.
No idea about the 50 centimes.

But if you notified your hotel to call a taxi at the last minute, the hotel could well have tacked on a service charge.

In addition to the dispatch fee that is charged and added to the flat rate, taxis are allowed to charge for wait time. Given that the driver was there before you were, you can't say that she did not have to wait for you and of course you think it was less than five minutes but who knows. In my experience, the human mind tends to perceive as less than it is the amount of time others spend waiting for us and lengthen the amount of time we spend waiting for others. Anyway, you should be downstairs in the lobby when you call for the taxi or outside 5 minutes before scheduled pick up time for a reserved taxi. See https://www.g7.fr/en/paris-taxi-fares If this happened on a Sunday, 4.5€ would be the cost for about 7 minutes of waiting and if it happened on a weekday, it would be about 8.5 minutes of waiting. Are you really sure that it took less than 5 minutes for you to do your final check of your hotel room and make your way outside?

Didn't the OP say that she had the hotel call at the last minute? That would account for the wait time.

He (or she) said that he had the front desk staff call when he was ready to do the final check of the room, IMO, it's highly unlikely that someone did a final check of the room and made their way to the pick up area in less than 5 minutes. Hence the wait charge. The driver probably only waited because a hotel had called and so she was confident that the passenger would show up. If this had been an apartment, I believe there is a very good chance that the driver would have left when no one was outside when she arrived.

There was only one passenger. I chalk the whole thing up to experience, but I now know there can be a bunch of add-ons when using the taxis.

There are not a whole bunch of add-ons when taking a taxi to the airport. At most there are three: dispatch fee, wait charge if you are not ready and the fee for additional passengers over four. In your case, if you had been out front, there would have been only a dispatch fee. I actually think the wait fee is fair. Why should the driver sit around waiting for the passenger for nothing? If your driver had left when you were not there, I doubt that you would have been pleased. The fact that the driver was very close to your hotel when she got the call actually suggests that the system worked perfectly. The driver got a call for immediate dispatch and showed up immediately. Because you were not there, the wait fee applied. It seems like part of your complaint is about the dispatch fee plus the wait charge. If you did not want to pay the dispatch fee, you could have walked over to the Champs Elysees or waited out front of your hotel until a taxi happened by. Taxis in Paris charge a dispatch fee which is better than the former system in which they charged an approach fee which varied and I have heard of taxis showing up with 15€ already on the meter under the previous system.

Here is G7 Taxi's explanation, so you will know next time.

The wait time depends on how long you take to get to the taxi:
https://www.g7.fr/en/paris-taxi-fares

Here is G7 Taxi's explanation, so you will know next time.

Thanks so much for posting the link. I'm sure it will help others in the future.

My wife and I are working on a trip in October. She has business in London and we plan to take the Eurostar to Paris before heading home. We'll be staying in the Rive Gauche area and flying out of CDG. For me, it will be worth taking the taxi instead of public transportation when we depart.

BTW, our plan is to stay in a small establishment in a neighborhood. We are more interested in ambience than in seeing the tourist sites.

We have never been charged a wait fee but we are down to the taxi we order from apartments timely; they always come a bit early so we factor that in. The 4 Euro dispatch fee is for any time you call rather than hail a taxi. We end up paying 57 to the airport each time because we reserve the night before. If we called last minute, it would be 54.

The plus is you don't have to tip taxis in France. We do a bit if the driver is unusually helpful. My arm was in a cast this fall and the driver got my luggage from the lobby of the apartment and got me a luggage cart at the airport, so of course I tipped him, but for someone less helpful we don't.

If you call a taxi, there's an extra charge. If you simply grab a taxi from a taxi stand, the price is fixed - but there can still be extras depending on people and luggage.

I was more disappointed with an express shuttle a hotel receptionist pitched to me. The brochure said 18 euro in big letters, which is more than the RER but not horrible. So I said sure, I'll take the shuttle. She said it was something like 50 euro, the same as a taxi (no telling if there were also extras for booking them). The fine print on the back of the brochure broke it down into charges for different size groups - the 18 applied to groups of four. I decided against it.

There are no luggage fees anymore, and this also applies to strollers and wheelchairs.

There are no extras for people until you exceed 4 and no charges for luggage. Any cabbie trying to add such charges is cheating and should be reported. I continue to be astonished to hear of cabbies trying to fleece riders since the fixed charges went into effect since it plays into the hands of the scab Uber community. The OP of this thread was no however fleeced.

FWIW, we have generally paid less than the fixed prices before they went into effect. We rarely paid more than 45 for a cab ride to or from CDG and the right bank; we usually stayed in the 17th or 18th and paid about 40 most times instead of the fixed price today of 50. From ORY we often paid less than 30 to the left bank although we did have one trip from ORY at night to the 17th that ran about 45 so that one would have been a savings at 35.

Thank you to all for the valuable input, information, and links.

But there are fixed flat rate fees for both airports, now, so you won't have to worry.