car rental return in Paris

Are you aware that it will cost a lot to drop a car off in a country other than the one you are renting in? Are you spending time in Paris, or just dropping the car there? Where are you coming from?

it's inside the airport. make sure you know exactly which terminal your flight is at, so you can return car there, instead of other terminals. CDG is huge, you don't want to waste time on shuttles.

And if you are going to be spending some time in Paris, you have other options with respect to where you can drop that car. For example, I've rented before with Hertz at their office in Esplanade de les Invalides at the Air France bus terminal...fairly close to the Rue Cler area in Arrondissement: 7eme (central Paris). I believe there are several rental agencies there. You can pick up or drop there (or both).

I just returned a car to CDG on Sunday; do make sure to get to the right terminal to avoid having to take the shuttle. The signage was pretty good. Traffic, however, was pretty crazy, although we avoided most of it because we were returning a car rather than picking up or dropping off people. And do get to the airport early. I usually pooh-pooh the 3 hour recommendation, but not at CDG. On-line check-in really helped speed things up even though we had to print boarding passes and check bags at the airport. There were long lines at check-in, then long lines at Passport Control, then the usual lines at security.

Teri states she is taking the train to London and is not flying out of Paris.

"We are actually dropping off the car and taking the train to London so we will not be flying out of Paris." Since the OP is taking the RER B to Gare du Nord to catch the Eurostar (my assumption), a better answer might be, what drop off is located close to either the CDG 1 or CDG 2 RER stations?

Andrea is absolutely right, it will cost a lot of $ to return the car in France rather than in Germany. If you return it in Germany, you can take a train to Paris to catch the Eurostar to London. If you still want to return it in France, I would return it somewhere outside of Paris and take the RER or a train into Paris. Will save you getting stuck in traffic. It is a lot easier to drive out of Paris than into Paris, in my experience.

We Americans find it just amazingly difficult to visualize a vacation/travel without rental cars. The idea of actually getting from and to any useful points by train is almost unheard of in the USA. I was the same way on my first trip to Europe. Did the whole rental car thing of picking up in Zurich (yep, in the country with one of the best public transport systems in the world) and dropping in Brussels with a huge drop off fee. Paid an arm and a leg for petrol whenever I could actually find that stupid Bleifrei. And tolls out the wazoo of course. Drove into AND parked in downtown Paris. I really don't know how we even accomplished this. We were so naive and had never even HEARD about the European Train System...can you believe it? Take the train - it's a thousand times easier and cheaper.

The preceeding is a succinct explanation of why the 250 million vehicles registered in Europe are owned solely by AE and Gemut for the exclusive use of American visitors.