Well, the fact is there are hundreds of memorials and sites here in Normandy - see our Normandy Facts page, but the average writer of guide books and travel websites like the vast majority of visitors to Normandy comes here and sees the same few well known sites and leaves happy in the knowledge that they have “done” the D-Day sites. Please don’t misunderstand us, these famous sites are well worth visiting and indeed we include many on our tours. But what we are trying to achieve in planning our itineraries is something different. We find that it’s often the obscure sites that people have not heard of before taking a Battlebus tour that they remember long after their trip. Take the British 6th Airborne Division, most tourists are already aware that around 150 men landed at Pegasus Bridge, well what did the other thousands of men do on D-Day? Of course we cannot tell you what they all did, but on our British Highlights Tour not only will you hear in detail about the assault at Pegasus bridge, but you’ll hear about some of the other units too. Perhaps Major Macleod at Varaville chateau for example, or the twins who both died in combat. Whichever stories our guide tells on the day, it’s the blend of the famous and not so famous stories that you’ll remember.

Our itineraries are designed to show a selection of places that over the course of the day build like a jigsaw puzzle into a balanced experience of the area visited. Like a good novel, the day has a beginning, a middle and an end and as the hours pass the relevance of each site visited becomes clearer. So we ask you to not look at our itineraries and think about the sites that we don’t include, look at what we do include and ask yourself if the day appears to cover the subject in an organised way? After all if you come all this way, have booked a tour and are just taken to all the famous places that are signposted and listed in the guide-books, what is the point of taking it? We enjoy taking you to gateways overlooking fields, down lanes to places overlooking the beaches that few people know about and to little villages that others pass through without stopping.

We put a lot of thought into our itineraries, we don’t just throw them together to make them sound appealing by listing as many famous places as we can to tempt you to spend your money. Of course we want you to choose Battlebus, and yes we do what we can here on our website to make the different tours sound interesting and informative, but above all we want the tours to function correctly when you visit with us. There’s no long-term benefit in us listing itineraries that sound wonderfully impressive when you browse the website but that are rushed are unfulfilling in practice. We stand by our product and we believe our pages of client testimonials speak for themselves.

Please note, the exact order of sites visited, and the time spent at each location on any of our tours varies from day to day.  Though we tend to to tackle the sites chronologically, for example covering the airborne landings that occurred overnight on June 5th/6th before we go to the beaches, no two tours run exactly the same way.  The individual guides tell different stories at the various sites and interpret actions and battles in their own ways.  We do not ask them to stick to a script - that would just stifle their creativity and style.  The freedom they have to do the tours "their own way" keeps the tours fresh and interesting for both them and their clients.  Plus the weather and tides have an impact on the day, as does the time of year, parking and the amount of traffic on the roads.  Yes, there is always a need to keep an eye on the clock, and the guides have to run a "tight ship" to accomplish a thorough tour, but within that framework there is scope for every tour to have it's very own "dynamic."