Your site is wonderful, by the way. Very informative. If I’ve understood correctly, each mobile phone can carry tickets only for one individual? And the only ways of holding a ticket for RER are either on a navigo card or on a mobile phone. So landing in CDG it’s no use going to the ticket machine as a family of 4 with only 2 mobile phones between us? We need to go to a manned ticket office and buy physical navigo cards for each of the children?
There’s no way of just buying 4 tickets to Paris?
1 answer
Hi there,
That's correct that each mobile phone can only actively use/validate a single ticket or pass for one person for the duration of that ticket's/pass' validity (90-120 minutes max for tickets, up to 31 days for passes).
If we're talking about single-use RER tickets (rather than multi-use passes), the Navigo Decouverte card (and Paris transport phone apps) cannot actually hold/use any RER tickets at all. RER station-to-station tickets or CDG to Paris RER tickets, can only exist as single-use paper/coupon tickets inserted into fare gates / turnstiles. There's no card or app that can hold these RER tickects. (There's confusingly a new CDG Airport Metro Train ticket that can only be used on phones & Navigo Cards, but it's not a RER ticket. Will discuss at bottom.)
With that in mind, you can very easily buy 4 single-use, physical RER tickets for you & your family from automated ticket machines at CDG Airport train stations, that will cover the RER B from CDG to Paris and transfers onto Metro trains or other RER trains within zone 1. This RER ticket would be called a Billet Aeroport CDG - Paris and is available from the automated ticket vending machines or from the tickets office / windows at the CDG train stations. (If your children are 9 & under, they can use the reduced fare / tarif réduit versions of this ticket.)
If you happen to be traveling from CDG into Paris and beyond zone 1 (say you're staying in Versailles or near Disneyland, both of which are beyond zone 1) you could buy a CDG Airport Metro Train ticket on Navigo Easy cards which covers going from zone 5 (CDG) to zone 1 (central Paris) and back out as far as zone 5 again, all on the same fare which must be put on a Navigo Easy card or a mobile phone (this fare doesn't exist as a single-use ticket). Learn more about the CDG Airport Metro Train ticket here. If you don't need to type of coverage, ignore this and stick with the basic CDG Airport - Paris RER ticket.