About this site, and about me
I am Élodie Vasseur. I grew up in Bayeux, twenty minutes from Omaha Beach, and I spent four seasons working front of house at the Musée du Débarquement in Arromanches. This site exists because of what I learned doing that job: people arrive here with plans that cannot physically work, and nobody tells them until they are standing at a bus stop with a timetable that has one departure on it.
Why I started writing this
At the museum desk in Arromanches the same conversation happened several times a week. A couple would come in having taken the train from Paris to Bayeux that morning, pleased with themselves, and ask which bus went to the beaches. There is no train along the coast. The bus that connects Bayeux to the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer runs one round trip a day, and only from late April to early November. The five beaches are strung across roughly 80 km, and the sites people come for sit between 15 and 60 km apart with almost nothing running between them.
That is the single fact that decides a Normandy trip, and most of what is written about the region skips it in favour of adjectives. So the pages here start from four questions instead: where you are starting from, whether you have a car, how much of a day you have, and whose sector you actually want. That last one catches people out — every default D-Day tour on the market is American, and if your grandfather landed at Juno or Gold, the default tour does not go there.
I have walked all five beaches out of season, which I recommend. Omaha at low tide in February, with the water a kilometre out and nobody on it, tells you more than any exhibition can.
Why this site publishes no prices
You will not find a price anywhere on this site. Not for a tour, not for a museum, not for a train, not for a hotel. That is deliberate, and it is worth explaining properly because it is unusual.
Tour prices move with the date, the season, how far ahead you book and how many of you there are. A private van is priced per vehicle, so what each person pays depends entirely on the size of the party. Museum tariffs are revised most years, usually in January or February. Train fares to Bayeux swing enormously between an advance ticket and a walk-up one. A figure typed onto a webpage is accurate for about a fortnight and misleading for the rest of its life — and a stale number is worse than no number, because you plan around it and then feel cheated at the checkout.
So instead of a figure, every page tells you the things that do not go stale: what is inside a ticket and what is not, which tours include entrance fees and lunch and which leave them out, which include tips and which do not, and what actually moves the number up or down. That is the whole of what a D-Day tour costs, written without a single figure in it. When you want the real number for your date, the booking panel on the page pulls it live from GetYourGuide, which is the only place it is ever correct.
The same principle applies to facts. Where the sources genuinely disagree — and on D-Day casualty figures they disagree a great deal — I give the range and say so rather than picking the tidiest number. The National WWII Museum puts it plainly in its own fact sheet: many of the numbers are approximations, and some sources vary widely.
What this site is not
I am not a tour operator and I do not sell tickets. I am not affiliated with the American Battle Monuments Commission, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the Mémorial de Caen, the Juno Beach Centre or Normandy Tourism. I do not run any of the tours reviewed in the reviews section, and I have no say in what they charge or how they run.
The site is funded by affiliate commission: if you book through a link here, GetYourGuide pays me a small percentage and you pay exactly what you would have paid anyway. It does not change which tours I recommend, and it certainly does not stop me writing that one of the six is the lowest-rated of the lot and giving the reasons. The full arrangement is set out in the affiliate disclosure.
Corrections
Opening hours change, museums close for renovation, and operators alter itineraries without announcing it. If something here is wrong, or was right and has stopped being right, tell me: get in touch. Corrections get made and the page gets fixed.
Frequently asked questions
Who writes this site?
Élodie Vasseur — I grew up in Bayeux and worked four seasons at the Musée du Débarquement in Arromanches. Everything here is written in the first person because it is one person’s judgement, including the honest ranking in the tour reviews.
Why do you not list prices for the tours?
Because they move with date, season, group size and how far ahead you book, and a stale figure on a webpage helps nobody. What is inside a ticket and what changes the number is on what a tour costs; the live figure for your date is in the booking panel, straight from GetYourGuide.
Are you a tour operator?
No, and I am not affiliated with any museum, cemetery authority or tourist board. I write about the coast; booking happens on GetYourGuide. See the affiliate disclosure for how the site is funded.
Where should I start if I am planning a first trip?
With the best way to visit. It settles the four questions that decide everything else — where you are starting from, whether you have a car, how many days you have, and whose sector you want.