Best-of list · Bar Crawl Guide
The complete bar hopping guide for beginners — James Harlow on planning your first bar crawl, pacing, route strategy, and the best cities to start in.
The short answer
8 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
A bar hopping guide for beginners needs to answer one question honestly before anything else: what makes a bar crawl good rather than just a series of drinks in different locations? The answer is structure. The best bar hops follow a clear route, build in pace naturally, and end at the right place rather than wherever everyone lands out of momentum. We have planned bar crawls across 176 cities for groups ranging from 2 to 22 people, and the principles that make them work are consistent everywhere. If you are planning for a larger group and want a scoring format that keeps everyone engaged throughout the evening, our complete guide to how to plan pub golf adds a competitive layer to the standard bar crawl format.
Every first-time bar hopper should start with a three-stop structure. Three bars, one drink each, 45 minutes per stop, walking distance between each. That gives you a four-hour evening with built-in flexibility: you can extend any stop that is working well, skip the third if energy runs low, or add a fourth if everything is going right. The three-stop bar hopping guide framework works in every city because it is manageable and it does not require everything to go perfectly for the evening to succeed.
How we picked
The bar hopping guide for beginners distils to three principles. Plan three stops before you leave home. Stay in one walkable neighbourhood or between two adjacent ones. Pace with one drink per stop and food at the midpoint. Everything else is secondary. The bars in this guide cover New York and London specifically, but the framework transfers to every city in our guide across 60 locations. Build the same three-stop structure anywhere and the evening will work.
The best bar hops are the ones where every stop feels like you chose it for a reason, where the pacing feels natural rather than forced, and where the final bar is genuinely better than the first because you know more about what you want by the time you arrive. That outcome is achievable every time with the right framework and the right bars. Both are available in this guide.
James has planned bar hops across 176 cities for groups ranging from 2 to 22 people. He has never organised a bad one using the three-stop framework and is not planning to start now.
Last reviewed 2026-02-03 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.