Your Paris hotel or apartment
Your chauffeur is at the door at the agreed time, not circling the block. If your street is pedestrianised we agree a meeting point with you beforehand so nothing is improvised on the morning.
Seine-et-Marne
Eight centuries of French royal history in a forest an hour south of Paris, and far quieter than Versailles. Door to door from your hotel, your address or your airport terminal, with a chauffeur who waits while you visit.
From central Paris, one way: Executive Eco from €130 · Premium Van from €210 · tolls included
Instant price
Tell us where you are going and the price appears straight away. Nothing is charged online. A real person confirms your transfer in writing, usually within the hour.
Fixed price, agreed before you travel.Child seats, tolls, meet and greet and waiting time all included.
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Fontainebleau is the palace people mean when they say they want Versailles without the crowds. It is older, it was lived in for longer, and it feels much more like a house than a monument. Thirty-four sovereigns used it, from Louis VII in the twelfth century to Napoleon III. Napoleon Bonaparte called it the true home of kings, and it is the courtyard here that he stood in to say goodbye to his Imperial Guard before leaving for Elba.
The chateau sits inside one of the great forests of France, twenty-five thousand hectares of oak, beech and extraordinary sandstone boulders that made Fontainebleau the birthplace of modern bouldering. On the western edge is Barbizon, the village where a generation of painters walked out of their studios to paint the trees directly and, in doing so, laid the ground for Impressionism. It is entirely possible to do the palace, the forest and Barbizon in one unhurried day, which is exactly what a private car makes easy and a train timetable makes awkward.
Any address in Paris or the Paris region, and all three airports.
Your chauffeur is at the door at the agreed time, not circling the block. If your street is pedestrianised we agree a meeting point with you beforehand so nothing is improvised on the morning.
Orly is the closest of the three and Fontainebleau is a natural first stop on the way in. We track the flight, meet you in arrivals with a name sign and take the luggage with us.
Staying outside the city is not a problem and does not mean travelling into Paris first. We start wherever you are, including from a hotel at Disneyland Paris or in the southern suburbs.
There is no one distance from Paris to Fontainebleau, and we will not invent one. Fontainebleau lies south-east of the city. A guest starting from Orly is far closer than a guest starting from Charles de Gaulle, and a hotel in Montmartre is a different journey again from one in the thirteenth arrondissement. A single published figure would be wrong for almost everybody.
So we measure it instead. Put your real pickup point into the calculator above and it asks the routing service for the actual road route, then shows you the distance in kilometres and the driving time before it shows a price. For orientation only: guests leaving central Paris outside rush hour are usually in the car for something close to an hour, generally by the A6.
The southern exits from Paris are heavy on weekday mornings and on Friday afternoons in summer, when half the city drives the same way. If your plans allow it, leaving before eight makes a noticeable difference to both the drive and the palace.
The Grands Appartements are the heart of a visit: the Renaissance Gallery of Francis I with its stucco and frescoes, the ballroom, the throne room that is the only surviving one in France, and Napoleon's private apartments left much as he used them. Because the palace was continuously inhabited rather than abandoned and restored, the rooms read as a sequence of tastes layered on top of each other rather than a single frozen moment.
The gardens and the courtyards are free to walk and considerably less formal than Versailles: the carp pond, the English garden, the Grand Parterre, and the horseshoe staircase in the Cour d'Honneur where the farewell to the Guard took place.
The forest is the other half of the day, and it surprises people. Marked walking trails run from the edge of the town, the sandstone is strange and sculptural, and there are viewpoints at Les Trois Pignons and the Gorges de Franchard that feel a long way from the Paris ring road. Barbizon, ten minutes away, has the studios of Millet and Rousseau, one long street of galleries and a good choice of places to eat.
This is a suggestion and nothing more. Your chauffeur follows your plan, and you can rearrange it on the day without any fuss.
Your chauffeur meets you at your hotel and takes the A6 south. Water in the car, luggage in the boot if you are travelling on afterwards.
Dropped at the gates. Two hours covers the state apartments and the Napoleon rooms comfortably; add the Chinese Museum if it is open on your day.
Ten minutes by car. Lunch on the main street, then the painters' studios if you want them. Alternatively eat in Fontainebleau itself and go straight to the forest.
A walk at Franchard or Les Trois Pignons, or an hour in the gardens if walking is not on the cards. Back in Paris for the evening, or onward to Vaux-le-Vicomte.
Give us the ages when you book and the correct seat or booster travels with the car, at no extra cost. Asking in advance rather than on the morning is what makes that possible.
Three large cases in the Executive Eco, seven in the Premium Van. Nothing has to be left at a hotel or a station locker, which matters if Fontainebleau is your first or last day in France.
Children who have reached their limit inside a palace usually recover completely once they can climb on sandstone. The combination is the reason many families prefer Fontainebleau to Versailles.
Every price is built on the real road distance returned by the routing service, never on a straight line. Tolls, fuel and the chauffeur's time are inside the figure you see, so the quote is the total.
Around an hour from central Paris outside peak times, longer from Charles de Gaulle and shorter from Orly. The calculator above will give you the routed time for your exact address rather than a generic average.
For many visitors, yes. It receives a fraction of the visitors, the interiors are arguably richer, and the forest gives you a second half to the day. Versailles is grander and more famous; Fontainebleau is more comfortable to actually visit.
It normally closes on Tuesdays and on a small number of public holidays. Please check the official opening calendar for your date before you book the car, and we will plan around it.
Yes. Tell us roughly how long you expect to spend and we quote the day as a private hire with waiting time, rather than as two separate transfers. That is almost always the better arrangement for Fontainebleau.
Both work well. Vaux-le-Vicomte is around half an hour away and pairs naturally with Fontainebleau; Barbizon is ten minutes. Send us the combination on WhatsApp and we will tell you whether the timings are realistic.
Yes. Orly in particular is convenient for Fontainebleau. We track the flight, meet you inside arrivals and keep the bags with you all day. Choose the Premium Van if you are carrying full suitcases.
Yes. There is no meter. The figure shown for your route and your vehicle is the figure you pay, and traffic does not change it.
We can drop you at the main trailheads and car parks such as Franchard or Les Trois Pignons and collect you at an agreed time and place. The trails themselves are on foot only.
Get an instant price on the real road distance, or tell us the day you have in mind and we will shape the car around it.