Moving one traveller through Charles de Gaulle is a transfer. Moving twelve is an operation. The bags never land on the same belt, one person is still texting from passport control while the rest are already at the kerb, and somewhere in the party is a colleague who has decided, after ten hours in the air, that the airport coffee is a personal insult. Whoever booked the cars is the one who gets blamed if any of it slips.
CDG moved 72 million passengers in 2025 and Orly almost 35 million, and a group of eight to fifteen people feels every bit of that volume at once: longer immigration lines, more bags to reconcile, more ways for one missed message to scatter everyone across an arrivals hall the size of a small town. The point of a group airport transfer is not really the vehicle. It is the coordination that turns a dozen separate arrivals into a single clean departure from the kerb.
Get that coordination right and fifteen people leave together in one move. Get it wrong and you spend the first hour of the trip apologising. Most of the difference is planning, and a little of it is knowing what the law will actually let you put a group of that size into.
The vehicle, and the eight-seat line the law draws
Group vehicles in Paris come down to a short, honest list, and the place to start is the legal boundary, because it governs everything stacked above it.
Mercedes V-Class and equivalents, up to 8 passengers
The full-size executive van is the workhorse of group transfers: three rows, individual climate, and a rear bay that takes five to seven checked bags plus cabin luggage without anyone riding with a suitcase on their knees. Ride quality sits close to a sedan rather than a step down from one. A V-Class carries seven in real comfort and eight at a push, and that ceiling is not arbitrary.
A vehicle for hire with a driver, a VTC, is licensed in France for a maximum of nine seats including the driver. Eight passengers, put plainly. The V-Class lands exactly on that limit, which is why it is the largest vehicle a standard private-hire booking can legally carry a group in.
Licensed minibus, 9 to 16 passengers
The moment a group needs a ninth seat, French law reclassifies the trip. It becomes collective passenger transport, which has to run on a transport licence with a driver who holds the D1 permit, valid for up to sixteen passengers. This is not paperwork to wave away. A reputable operator dispatches either a vehicle inside the VTC limit or a properly licensed minibus with a qualified driver. It does not quietly seat a tenth passenger in an eight-seat van. For any group of nine or more, that distinction is worth confirming out loud at the booking stage.
Two vehicles in parallel, often the cleaner answer for 9 to 16
For nine to sixteen passengers there is frequently a better solution than a single minibus: two V-Classes dispatched together, each one inside the VTC limit, each with its own driver. It reads as the expensive option and often is not, once comfort per passenger enters the sum. It also buys resilience. If half the group clears customs while the other half waits on a delayed bag, one car can leave and the other can hold, instead of fifteen people standing on one. A single booking, two coordinated cars, one invoice is how a serious operator runs it. The same discipline that matches transport to the shape of a corporate delegation arriving for an event applies just as cleanly to a family of twelve landing for a wedding.
Why CDG multiplies every group variable
Charles de Gaulle is the largest airport in France and one of the busiest in Europe, and it does not shrink because your group grew. A few things bite groups specifically that a lone traveller never notices.
One group, more than one terminal. A party arriving on two flights, a European feeder and a long-haul say, can land in different terminals that sit twenty minutes apart even on the airport's own CDVAL shuttle train. That has to be planned out loud rather than assumed: one driver who waits for the last arrival, or a vehicle assigned to each terminal. Passengers routing in on connecting flights through CDG face the same terminal maze a fresh arrival does, with rather less patience left in the tank.
Ten people, ten bags, never at once. For a group of ten it is rare for every checked bag to reach the belt together. Build twenty to thirty minutes of slack between the last suitcase and the planned departure. The driver waits regardless; a realistic schedule keeps the waiting from becoming a problem at the far end of the trip.
The meeting point is set before takeoff, not after landing. At CDG international arrivals, Terminals 2E, 2F and 1, the chauffeur stands past the customs exit with a nameboard, in clear sight of the doors. Send every member of the group the exact meeting instruction before they board. A message fired into a group chat after landing reaches phones already scattered between baggage reclaim, the restroom and the wrong exit.
Non-EU groups, plan for the queue. For a party travelling on non-EU passports, border control at CDG can add thirty to sixty minutes at a busy arrival bank, and the wait is genuinely hard to predict. The transfer has to absorb it, which a fixed-price booking with generous wait time does and a metered taxi rank does not.
Orly, smaller but not simpler
Orly is compact next to CDG, which makes a group easier to hold together, and it carries three quirks of its own worth knowing before you book.
Since the 2019 renaming the airport runs as four sectors, Orly 1 through Orly 4, with group pick-up points marked on each arrivals level. The approach along the A6 and A10 is usually quicker and less clogged than the CDG corridor, so an off-peak run into central Paris tends to land in the thirty-five to forty-five minute band. Every route from Orly into the city shifts with the hour, and a group of twelve split across two vehicles wants the same departure window for both cars, which is worth stating when you book.
The third quirk is the clock. Orly runs a hard night curfew, tightened in 2025: no scheduled commercial movements between 23:30 and 06:00, with the cutoff now measured from the moment an aircraft leaves its parking stand rather than from takeoff, and the noisiest aircraft barred from 22:00. A delayed late arrival that creeps toward that edge can leave a group on the ground later than the timetable promised. If your flight is due in near the curfew, confirm the chauffeur is booked to operate late rather than assumed to be there.
The five things the organiser actually controls
Almost everything that goes wrong with a group transfer is decided before anyone has landed. Five of them sit squarely inside the organiser's hands, and together they are most of the game.
- Count the bags, not the heads. The most common booking error is sizing the vehicle to people and forgetting their luggage. Six travellers can arrive with eight cases and four carry-ons, which is a V-Class already full. Ski gear, trade-show kit and instrument cases move the maths again. State the real luggage count at booking, not just the headcount.
- Name one coordinator. One person holds the driver's number and sends the single message that matters, the one confirming the group is through customs. Four people each texting the driver amounts to nobody doing it.
- Agree the meeting point before boarding. Exact instruction, sent to everyone, while they can still read it sitting down. Sorting it out after landing is already too late.
- Build the buffer in. For an international arrival, thirty minutes from wheels-down to departure is realistic for an organised group and forty-five is comfortable. Set the dinner reservation against the comfortable figure, not the optimistic one.
- Pre-pay and fix the price. A pre-paid, fixed fare means no negotiation at the door, no currency fumble, no surprise supplement while fifteen people look on. Everyone boards and the money is already a closed question. A flight that runs badly late is exactly when that certainty earns its keep, because the meter never started.
What a group transfer costs in 2026
Group pricing works per vehicle, never per head, and that one fact is what makes it sharper value as the party grows: the cost of the car splits across more people the fuller it runs. Where a single sedan transfer is a fixed €105 into central Paris from CDG and €95 from Orly, a group vehicle scales from there by size, not by passenger. The per-vehicle logic behind what a private transfer should actually cost in 2026 is identical; a group simply shares one fare instead of stacking several.
| Group size | Vehicle | CDG to central Paris | Orly to central Paris |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 to 8 | Mercedes V-Class | €120 to €165 | €95 to €135 |
| 9 to 12 | Licensed minibus | €180 to €240 | €160 to €210 |
| 9 to 14 | Two V-Classes in parallel | €230 to €320 | €185 to €265 |
| 13 to 16 | Minibus or microbus | €240 to €340 | €210 to €290 |
Figures are per vehicle and indicative for 2026. They include tolls, meet and greet, and sixty minutes of free wait time on international arrivals, with French VAT applied at the standard rate. Extended waiting runs at an hourly rate from €75/h.
Where moving together actually pays
The instinct with a large group is to chase the lowest per-person number, and that instinct quietly produces the worst arrivals: a cab rank split across four meters, a rideshare app surging at the precise moment fifteen people open it, a minibus booked a passenger over its legal line. The per-vehicle model turns the logic around. A V-Class for eight lands near the cost of two sedans and arrives as one unit. A pair of coordinated vans for fourteen costs less per seat than almost anyone expects, and it removes the single point of failure that a lone minibus builds in.
What a group is really buying is not square metres of vehicle. It is one person who has the driver's number, a figure that a delay cannot move, and a plan that already accounts for the bag that comes last and the passport line that runs long. The vehicle is the easy part. The arrival is the product.
Plan a group airport transfer with PrivateDrive. One booking, coordinated vehicles, one invoice, fixed prices confirmed before you fly. Single transfers from €105 for CDG and €95 for Orly, group vehicles and parallel dispatch sized to the party, and a driver tracking every flight number on the manifest.