Itinerary books?

Some of you are probably wondering what the hell an itinerary book is. If you have never heard about it you will have to read this first post before going deeper into my blog.

Any music band has got itinerary books while on tour. It's kind of the bible for any member of the tour staff. They all would be completely lost without his copy of the itinerary book.

The itinerary is kind of a notebook that contains very detailed information about the tour they are working on. Their pages include plenty of data: Schedule, Tour personnel, Timetable, Hotels, Phone numbers, Flight times and many other interesting things they all need to know during their time on the road.

As this is only for tour staff, books are printed in a very limited number so they are not easy to collect. Every single person in the tour staff gets his own itinerary copy. As they are a useful tool for the staff, itinerary books are used on daily bases so it is not rare that they are showing some different level of wear after the tour is over.

There is usually a new itinerary issued for each leg of the tour and sometimes even local itineraries are printed for a specific show or for a mini tour like UK or Scandinavian part of a tour.

One important thing is that the information on the itinerary books is not 100% final and some things might have changed once on the road. Some final changes on travels, hotels or whatever are often decided after the itinerary is printed.

What I will try to compile on this blog is all those U2 itinerary books I have been collecting and also those I have maybe seen somewhere but I unfortunatelly don't own.

I would love you all to cooperate with your comments or information you might have, specially if you own one of those books missing in my collection.

I will only share general information about each book : a couple of pictures, tour or leg that the book belongs to, dates that the itinerary is covering, a couple of curious things I found in the book,....... but I will never share personal information from the books. So please don't ask me about where U2 slept last time they visited your town, if they flew out right after the show or any other kind of information I don't want to share.

You will also see that all pictures I show come with a watermark. This is just for "security" reasons. I don't want anybody to be ripped off on Ebay by someone selling a book that he doesn't really have. If he has it, he can take a picture of it instead of using this blog's pictures.

I hope you all enjoy reading and cooperating with me to make this a great blog for U2 collectors.

Take care

The Collector