Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris Is Being Upgraded PARIS - Charles de Gaulle is the second-largest European airport in terms of passengers - 61 million last year - and the seventh-largest worldwide. Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance/Brandimage A rendering of the Air France business-class lounge planned for a new satellite building at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. According to Skytrax, a consulting firm based in London that publishes one of the world's leading passenger surveys of airports, Charles de Gaulle ranked 34th last year out of the 73 European airports it covers, and 89th out of 208 worldwide. For many passengers, Charles de Gaulle represents what they hate about air travel: sprawling buildings with bewildering layouts; interminable waits at security, passport control and baggage claim; forgettable shops and restaurants; and often indifferent personnel. That may be about to change. This summer, Aéroports de Paris, the operator of Charles de Gaulle, and the French flag carrier, Air France, will begin an overhaul of their operations aimed at making the passenger experience at the airport more efficient and, they hope, more enjoyable. The push toward friendliness and efficiency comes as Charles de Gaulle and Air France face growing competition for trans-Atlantic passengers from other European hubs - including Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London - after a 2008 accord granted all European and American airlines the right to fly between any two airports in either region. Increasingly, the choice of transfer hub is becoming a factor in passengers" decisions about carriers, industry analysts say. The push also comes as other airports across the region - including those in Frankfurt, Munich, Copenhagen and Oslo - are spending heavily on new terminal capacity to keep pace with increases in passenger traffic of more than 5 percent each year. Heathrow Airport in London has been investing an average of £1 billion, or $1.6 billion, a year since 2008 to upgrade all its existing terminals by 2014. In June, the 2.5 billion euro ($3.3 billion) Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport will open south of Berlin, replacing the Schönefeld and Tegel airports and also Tempelhof, which closed in 2008. Until now, Charles de Gaulle had "always invested in the hardware but not sufficiently in the software - like politeness, good signage, imposing basic standards for the level of spoken English," said one European airport consultant who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Aéroports de Paris was a client. Charles de Gaulle "has always been very much focused on Parisian passengers, when the priority should have been on appealing to foreign visitors," the consultant added. For Alexandre de Juniac, who took over last year as chief executive of Air France, having a state-of-the-art hub in Paris is more than a matter of competitiveness: it is a question of survival. "The structural and commercial success or failure of Charles de Gaulle is the success or failure of Air France; we are in the same ship," Mr. Juniac said. If there is a problem of reputation, we will tackle it together. The first step in the upgrade, which will include roughly 2.4 billion euros ($3.2 billion) in new infrastructure investments by 2015, will be the opening of a new satellite to Terminal 2E in July. It is tailor-made to serve the needs of Air France, which represents more than half of all traffic at Charles de Gaulle. The new building, Satellite 4, will cost 560 million euros ($746 million) and is designed to accommodate an additional 7.8 million passengers annually. It will be dedicated exclusively to intercontinental flights operated by Air France and its SkyTeam alliance partners - 60 percent of the airport's total traffic - grouping under one roof tens of thousands of flights that are now scattered across three terminal buildings. The airport expects the move to significantly reduce connecting times for transfer passengers, who represented 52 percent of its traffic last year. "In the past, we have seen that when we offer new buildings, there is an immediate increase in the level of satisfaction," said Pierre Graff, chief executive of Aéroports de Paris, which also operates the area's second-busiest airport, at Orly, south of Paris. Part of what has made Charles de Gaulle such a headache for travelers, analysts said, has been its expansion's ad hoc nature.