The pub crawl app for students

It will happen at least once on any crawl with fifteen or more people, so plan for it rather than hoping. In the app the host can skip the stop mid-crawl and pick a reason — closed, too busy, too empty, or could not find it — and the app then offers to search for venues near that spot and drop one straight into the crawl. Everyone else's phone updates to the new stop, so the route carries on instead of twenty people standing on a pavement arguing about where to go. Practically: put the biggest, most group-friendly pub first, get to the busier venues early because doors tighten on large groups later, and if you are turned away, move the whole group together rather than trying to filter in a few at a time.

Work backwards from the finish. Decide when the night ends and where people are getting home from, then pick your pubs so the route walks back towards that point, with no leg longer than about ten minutes. Phone ahead for a group of fifteen or more, set a per-head budget and say it up front, and share one join code so the plan is not buried in a group chat. On the night, split into pods of four or five at the bar rather than ordering as one block, and give the group a fixed leave time at each stop.

Four to six. Allow about forty-five minutes per stop once you include walking, ordering and waiting for stragglers, so five pubs is roughly a four-hour night, and groups that plan eight or nine almost always lose people by the fourth. In the app a free route holds up to five stops, and Premium takes that to twelve — five is genuinely the right number for a first-year crawl anyway.

The organiser creates the crawl and the app produces an invitation code and a QR code for it. Everyone else either scans the QR or types the code in, and they land on the same crawl with the same stops in the same order on their own phone. There is no route to send round separately, and someone arriving at half nine can see which pub the group has got to rather than ringing you. Everyone joining needs a free account — you cannot join a crawl as a guest.

Yes, but the host needs Premium. A crawl created by a free account is capped at eight players, and that cap is on the crawl rather than on each person, so for a society social of fifteen to twenty the organiser is the one who needs to upgrade and nobody else pays anything. The same applies to Pub Golf and to routes longer than five stops — it is all keyed to whoever is hosting.

The free tier covers a real crawl: build or generate routes with up to five stops, keep up to three of your own routes, run a classic crawl for up to eight people, check in at every pub, take photos at each stop that stay afterwards, and use the Categories, No Names and Buy a Drink wheel games. Premium is what a big society crawl needs — groups over eight, up to twelve stops, unlimited routes, Pub Golf scoring, the Forfeit and Waterfall wheel games and no ads. Only the host pays, and only the host needs it for the whole group to get those things on that crawl.

Set the number before you publish the plan, because that is what decides who comes. In most UK cities a five-stop crawl where everyone buys their own drink lands somewhere between fifteen and thirty pounds a head depending on the city and what people are drinking. Say the figure up front, pick at least two stops that are genuinely cheap, and make clear that soft drinks are fine at any of them.

Midweek, usually Tuesday or Wednesday. Pubs are quieter so a group of twenty actually gets served, door staff are far more relaxed about large groups arriving together, and student nights and drinks deals cluster Monday to Wednesday. Saturday sounds right and is the hardest night to run a big group on.

For fifteen people or more, tell them you are coming even if they will not take a formal booking. Phone rather than email, ask for the duty manager, and give the date, the arrival time and the headcount. Plenty of pubs will not reserve space for a drinks-only group at the weekend but will happily hold an area midweek, and a manager who is expecting you will put an extra person behind the bar.

Yes. Generated routes are built on real walking directions rather than straight lines, and you set how long you want the walks between stops to be before it builds — five to fifteen minutes is the sensible range for a big group. Every route shows the distance and the walking time to the next venue, and if you hand-pick the pubs yourself you can run the optimiser to reorder them into the shortest walk.

Ending a crawl early keeps everything you have already done — the pubs you visited, the check-ins and the photos are all saved to the crawl and to everyone's history, so a night that stops at stop three still counts. You can also leave a crawl paused and pick it up from the app later rather than starting again from the beginning.

Design it in rather than apologising for it. Pick venues with proper alcohol-free options rather than one warm bottle of cola, make one round in the middle a soft round for everybody, and score any game on stops reached, check-in order or photos rather than on drinks. Nobody should have to explain why they are not drinking, and nobody should be bought a drink they did not ask for.

Photos taken at each stop go to the crawl itself, not to one person's camera roll, so the whole night ends up in one place that everybody on it can look through and react to. They do not expire. For a society that is the honest reason to bother: the reel from this year's crawl is what fills next year's.