Some notes about hosting
- Ideally, a crawl should start and end near a railway or tube station. If not, it is better to end near a station (this is often a moot point in central London).
- It may seem obvious but the pubs should be large or empty enough for us to all to fit into (however a lot of people don't turn up to the crawl until after 7.30pm or so, so pubs before that won't usually need as much consideration).
- Timings: No hard and fast rules here. Some hosts have a fixed amount of time per pub (e.g. 45 mins), some stay longer in the better pubs or if they want to include a food stop. Generally, the later in the evening it is, the harder it is to move people onto the next pub, so short stops are best avoided then.
- Research - if the crawl is going to be on a Friday night, the research should really be done on a Friday night. Every host has at some point done the research on a Monday night only to find that the pubs are too busy to get into on the night of the crawl.
- Publicans - most venues don't welcome pub crawls, so if asking them about any likely closures (for refurbishment etc) best not to mention that you're thinking of hosting a crawl. (It is not uncommon for us to go to a pub, fill it up, those already present get fed up with the congestion and leave, then we leave and the pub is then completely empty! Then again, there have been occasions when there has been little custom until we've turned up, much to the publican's delight.)
- The meeting announcement needs to contain the first pub (& time of leaving it), contact number, and the website address.