Bar Crawl

Night-out groups here split almost evenly between Friday and Saturday, which is unusual. Nearly every other event leans hard toward Saturday, because there's a birthday or a wedding attached to it. A crawl has neither, so ask us about both nights and take whichever has the vehicle you actually want.

Fourteen is the typical crawl group, and that's exactly the size where the vehicle choice stays open. Think about what happens between bars. If the ride is a stop in itself, with the music up and people standing, take the 16-passenger party bus. If the route is tight neighborhood streets and short hops, the 14-passenger limo Sprinter parks closer and loads faster.

Crawls that start at fourteen often finish at nineteen once friends of friends hear about it, which is when the 20-passenger party bus becomes the safer booking. They're impulsive, too. A quarter of everything we're asked for comes in inside two weeks, so if yours is one of those, call rather than email.

Each has a local page with pickup notes, including Tempe and Gilbert. If the crawl is Old Town only, the Scottsdale nightlife guide goes block by block, and for a beer-first version the brewery tour page is the better map.

There are two kinds of bus crawl, and confusing them is how a night falls apart at stop three.

The walking crawl with a bus on each end. You ride to one district, walk between four or five bars, and ride home. The vehicle is transport and a safe way back. That's the right plan for Old Town, Mill Avenue or Westgate, where the bars are steps apart.

The rolling crawl. The bus takes you to every stop because they aren't near each other: a brewery in Chandler, a patio in Gilbert, a dive in Tempe, a rooftop downtown. The ride is a quarter of the night, and that's the point. This is where a party bus beats a Sprinter outright.

For a rolling crawl, order the stops in a line instead of a zigzag. Chandler to Gilbert to Tempe to downtown runs steadily northwest with 15 to 20 minute legs, and the reverse works too. Tempe to Glendale to Scottsdale does not. The route planner shows you the legs, and the rule of thumb is that any leg over 25 minutes should replace a stop rather than be added on top of one.

Every crawl loses time in the same place: getting people out of a bar. Fifteen people finishing drinks, closing tabs and finding the bathroom takes twenty minutes if nobody owns the clock.

• Name a crawl captain. One person owns the time and talks to the chauffeur. It shouldn't be the guest of honor.
• Give a ten-minute warning at every stop. Out loud and in the group chat.
• Pay as you go. Open tabs are the number one cause of delay. Close out each round, or have one person run a single tab and settle later.
• Call ahead for more than ten people. Bars can staff for you or hold a section, and a few will tell you honestly that fifteen at once is too many.
• Put food in the middle. Stop two or three should have a real kitchen. Tacos at nine buys you two more hours.
• Headcount before the bus moves. Every single time.

The drink calculator helps you stock the ride sensibly, and on-board beverage rules are worth asking about when you request your quote.

A theme gives a crawl shape and makes it much easier to sell to the group chat.

• The brewery line. Arizona's craft scene clusters in Tempe, Gilbert, Chandler and central Phoenix, which makes a natural four-stop route.
• Patio season. October through April the Valley has some of the best outdoor drinking weather in the country. Pick places with a patio and a view and use all of it.
• The summer indoor crawl. June through September, flip it: every stop indoors, every transfer door to door. The walk you'd happily take in March is miserable in July.
• Game day. Start at a sports bar for kickoff and move at halftime and the final whistle.
• Holiday crawls. St. Patrick's Day, Halloween weekend and the December Santa crawls all pile onto one or two dates, so those need the earliest request by a wide margin.