Normandy Tours

We used Overlord tours several years ago. Great guides with vast knowledge of the battles and units etc.

The public tours offered by Overlord use vans and will generally have more than four participants, but I think the company also offers private tours, as do other companies in that niche.

We used Sean Claxton for a private tour for WWII in Normandy and had an excellent experience. Definitely recommend.

https://www.normandyinsight.com/your-guides

Sean Claxton was our guide for a 2-day "American Experience" tour offered by the now defunct BattleBus, and he was in fact amazing. But he will not drive for you. If you can make arrangements for a driver, he will be a wonderful guide.

In 2019, we were very happy with the tours offered by Overlord, and they offer private tours.

I would suggest trying Dale Booth. You can contact him at dboothnormandytours.com We toured with him when he used to work for BattleBus tours years ago, but now he’s on his own. He is frequently the guide for Rick Steves tours when they visit Normandy. He’s an excellent storyteller and has met many of the men who participated in military action in this part of France.

There are many museums: Overlord museum, Utah Beach, Omaha Beach, Airborne museum in St. Mere Eglise, Bayeux, Caen. Which one do they want to see on their own time?

A private tour would probably be best so they can customize the itinerary. You can see the standard itineraries on the websites for the guides already recommended. The tours move pretty fast - less than an hour at most stops. They will need a full day for the tour. Getting to their museum of choice will take some planning. There aren’t a lot of public transportation options in the area.

I thought the museum in Bayeux (Museum of the Battle of Normandy) was a good compromise of breadth and reasonable size. You probably would want more time than you have in Normandy in order to include the very large museum in Caen. Don't forget the other things to see in Bayeux itself: the historic center, the cathedral, the tapestry. There's a Commonwealth war cemetery out near the museum, and the tourist office offered a walking tour of the town as of 2017.

Even if they do a tour, they will benefit greatly by learning as much as they can ahead of time. The fact that you mentioned only Omaha and Utah Beaches, and not the paratrooper areas around Sainte-Mère-Églsie, the Normandy American cemetery or Point du Hoc, indicates to me that they or you only have a very cursory understanding of the history of this place, but are primarily interested in the United States areas of battle. The latter is fine if that is their interest, but there was so much more to this area than just the beaches—even from just a U.S. perspective. Maybe I am wrong about my assumptions, but certainly the more you learn, the more you will get out of your trip.

As far as museums to visit on their own, I personally found the Caen museum highly over-rated, but I can highly recommend the Utah Beach museum and the D-day Museum in Bayeux. Plus the much smaller Paratrooper museum in Sainte-Mère-Église is a gem, and the town itself is a great place to visit.

I also highly recommend Dale Booth! We just did the tour with him on Dec. 22 and it was a day we will not forget! It was a private tour (there were 6 of us) and he picked us up in Bayeux at our hotel. He brought the invasion to life and we ended at the American Cemetary. You can email him at [email protected]

Dale Booth is the top choice. For context, I routinely hire RS recommended guides on our trips. To name a few I've hired: Pina Esposito (Pompeii), Ken Hanley (Edinburgh - he's on RS' show), Hernan Satt (Madrid Tours). I would estimate I've hired about ten of RS' guides in total. And I would recommend each of them (the three I mentioned are outstanding). But the best guide I've ever hired was Dale, hands down.

To give you a flavor of his tours: at both Utah and Omaha beaches he draws the entire battle in the sand on the beach while pointing out the relevant landmarks...this after he has shown you German defenses and strategies on the way to the beaches; he takes you to a small church used as a make-shift medic area and relays a first-hand account of what actually happened there on the day of the battle - an account taken from an interview he personally conducted with the medic who was there. The entire day is like this.

I hired Dale b/c someone in this forum said they had planned their itinerary around Dale's schedule. We are returning to France later this year and have planned the trip around Dale's availability, but this time for two days' of tour. One last point - you do not have to be a WW2 or history buff to enjoy Dale's tours. They're accessible for everyone.

We used Dale Booth Tours, even though Dale did not do our tour himself. It was just my wife and myself, and really worth it. What made this private tour so meaningful was how the guide built real stories and pictures into the entire tour. We did the two-day American tour so we got to toure the beaches and the countryside where the other parts of D-Day took place, and really enjoyed the Airborne museum in St. Mere Eglise.

We recently had a private one-day tour of the Beaches with Dale Booth (dboothnormandytours.com) and highly recommend him.
Dale is fantastically knowledgable and an excellent story-teller. He customized the day for us based on our interests and kept all three of us engaged throughout (including our 16-year old son).

10/10 [Shelley]