Disneyland Paris Layover: Chessy Station
Part of the full Paris Layover Guide: Notre-Dame From CDG
Disney Village and the path around Lake Disney at Disneyland Paris cost nothing to walk into, and the Marne-la-Vallée-Chessy station they sit beside runs a high-speed train that reaches the airport in about ten minutes.
The resort sits 32 kilometres east of central Paris, which makes it the one place in the region where the airport is closer than the city is. Everything below happens within a few minutes’ walk of the station, or one stop along the line.
Ten minutes from the Disneyland Paris station to Charles de Gaulle airport
One building here holds two stations. The commuter side is the eastern terminus of the RER A, on a single island platform; alongside it are five tracks of high-speed line, opened in May 1994, two years after the RER arrived with the resort in April 1992. Disney paid 38.1 million euros of the 126.5 million the original station cost, which is why it stops where it does: the platforms come up between the two park entrances and the front of Disney Village.
The high-speed tracks are the useful part on a flight day. Trains run through to the airport’s own station roughly once an hour and take ten or eleven minutes, which is a shorter ride than most people manage between two terminals. It is a reserved-seat train at full fare, though, and no travel pass covers it, so the saving is in time rather than money. The coach service between the resort hotels and the airport takes about an hour on the motorway and costs 24 euros for an adult.
Disney Village and Lake Disney are free to walk into
Disney Village is the strip of restaurants, shops and a cinema between the station and the park gates, and there is no ticket for it: doors open at 8am and stay open after the parks have shut. Behind it the ground opens out onto Lake Disney, an artificial lake with a flat paved loop running round it past the three lakeside hotels. It takes about half an hour to walk, it is level the whole way, and it is the only part of the resort where you can sit down without buying something.
The thing hanging over the water is a tethered helium balloon that lifts thirty people to 100 metres on a cable and brings them back down, and it needs no park ticket either: 19 euros for an adult booked online, 14 for a child aged three to eleven, free below that, daily from 9am and weather permitting, with high wind closing it at no notice. From the top you can see the whole resort, the two parks laid out flat, and the farmland the whole thing was built on.
Going into a park is a different decision. Tickets are dated, they start around 55 euros for one park on a quiet weekday, and one-day entry really wants a day rather than an afternoon.
Either way, the gates settle the luggage question for you: nothing larger than 55 by 40 by 25 centimetres goes through park security, hard-sided suitcases are refused outright, and the storage windows outside each entrance hold a fixed number of lockers that go early on busy mornings.
A shark tank under the Val d’Europe shopping centre
One stop west on the same commuter line, then five minutes on foot, is a mall that pretends to be a Parisian arcade from about 1890: cast-iron columns, a barrel-vaulted glass roof, painted balustrades along the upper gallery. It opened in 2000 with 190 shops and a hypermarket, and there is an aquarium in the basement under all of it: eight themed zones running from the French coast to the Amazon, a penguin enclosure, and a glass tunnel you walk through with sharks over your head.
It takes about an hour, it opens 10am to 7pm with last admission an hour before, and it runs 20 euros booked ahead against 25 at the door, so timed entry is worth holding on a wet Saturday, when this is where everyone at the resort ends up. Next door is La Vallée Village, an outlet of discounted brands laid out as a fake village street.
None of this was here forty years ago. The whole district, five communes of farmland east of Paris, was rebuilt under a 1987 agreement between Disney and the French government: the state extended the commuter line and put a high-speed station on it, and Disney developed a new town called Val d’Europe around the resort. The mall’s Belle Époque ironwork is about as authentic as the village street next to it, which is either the joke or the point.
The commuter line into central Paris runs without a change
The RER A runs west from here to Châtelet-Les-Halles in about forty minutes, every ten to thirty minutes depending on the hour, with the last train back leaving the centre after midnight. Two and a half hours out there and back is the honest minimum, so this only makes sense with five hours or more in hand, and at that point you are doing a different trip: the island in the Seine, Notre-Dame and the Louvre courtyard that the main Paris layover guide covers.
Under that, stay east. The village, the lake and the aquarium fill three or four hours between them without anyone having to hurry, which is the argument for this end of the line in the first place.
Collect the suitcase before you go back through the station, and decide between the two airport routes before you are standing in front of the departure boards: the ten-minute train and the hundred-minute one leave from opposite sides of the same building.
Frequently asked questions
Is the direct train from Chessy to Charles de Gaulle covered by a Paris travel ticket?
No, and this catches people out. The ten-minute service to the airport is a full high-speed train, sold as a reserved seat at whatever the fare happens to be that day, and no Navigo pass or flat-rate airport ticket touches it. The cheap route is the other one: the RER A commuter line west to Châtelet-Les-Halles, then the RER B north to the airport, which the 14-euro Paris Region to Airports ticket does cover. That way takes about an hour and forty minutes rather than ten.
Do you need a park ticket to get into Disney Village?
No. Disney Village is open to anyone from 8am until late every day, and so is the path around Lake Disney behind it, with no gate and no admission. The bag search on the way in still applies. Only the two theme parks themselves are ticketed, and those tickets are dated, so a spare afternoon does not get you into one on a whim.
What is the last useful train back to the airport?
The direct high-speed trains are roughly hourly and the last one leaves Chessy at about 10.20pm, arriving at the airport eleven minutes later. After that the commuter line is the fallback: the RER A runs until well past midnight, but with the change at Châtelet you need to be leaving by around 10pm to make it work. Check the day's actual timetable rather than the pattern, because the direct service thins out at weekends.
Is any of this worth doing in winter?
Half of it. Disney Village and the lake are open ground with very little shelter, and the tethered balloon does not fly in high wind, which is a common enough reason for it to shut without notice between November and March. The Val d'Europe shopping centre and the aquarium underneath it are the wet-weather answer, indoors, warm, and five minutes' walk from their own station on the same line.
Is a Disneyland Paris park ticket worth booking ahead?
If you are going in at all, yes, because the price is set by date rather than fixed and the cheapest days sell through. Dated tickets run from around 55 euros for one park on a quiet weekday to well over 100 in the school holidays, so booking the date in advance is the difference between the two. On a few free hours rather than a full day, it is generally not worth the money: the free half of the resort is the part that fits.