Everyone at CookiesHQ has experienced the dreaded question: “where should we go tonight?”. There’s no doubt many of you have encountered the following situation too. You plan a get-together or night out with friends, and you have no idea what places are available to you and nobody can decide on where to go. Now the world is crammed full of thousands of undiscovered pubs and bars, it’s more difficult than ever to know where to start.

There are a handful of websites and apps that attempt to solve this issue. However, many are littered with faults. There are those that restrict the user’s location to specific towns or cities such as London or New York – they certainly weren’t useful for those of us in Bristol and Manchester. Some fail to utilise the APIs of helpful services such as Google Maps or Foursquare, resulting in very few results being displayed. Others make it far too complicated to use, including unnecessary features and poorly-designed UX.

As our Cookies Labs allow each team member to experiment and test new techie things, they provided the perfect opportunity to get the ball rolling. So, we set on a journey to create our very own pub crawl app. Researching other similar unsuccessful apps, we knew some of the necessary components ours needed to contain:

Be useful

We wanted an app that showed us all the pubs and bars along a designated route. Having a healthy number of available options would give the user a chance to make an informed decision about which to visit. It also alleviates the potential danger of missing out on any hidden gems.

Be accessible anywhere

It was important that the app shouldn’t be location-specific. It needed to be available to use from any start location. Whether you’re visiting friends across the country, or on holiday abroad, the app should be able to plot results for whatever area was needed.

Be user-friendly

We all know how troublesome it can be using your phone when you’re four pints into your night. It needed to be simple to use for tipsy eyes, focusing on the basic needs of our users.

Thus, we created and launched Bar Voyage.

Bar Voyage is an app that helps you plan a pub crawl and explore new drinking establishments. It’s designed to eliminate the headache of planning your night out (although we can’t guarantee you won’t have one in the morning!).

All you need to do is enter your start location and destination and Bar Voyage will do the rest. Local bars, pubs and clubs will be mapped along your route, allowing you to pick the best ones along your journey. Simple.

You can use the app for planning pub crawls, stag & hen dos, socialising with friends and discovering the best bars around.

Best of all, Bar Voyage doesn’t limit your location. So if you wanted to drink your way from Brighton to Manchester, you have the freedom to do so using the app.

It’s a must-have app for travellers anywhere.

You can now find Bar Voyage on the Apple and Play stores. So give it a try and let us know what you think. We’ll soon be adding even more exciting features to take Bar Voyage to the next level. We’re open to ideas, so if you have any recommendations then we’d love to hear from you.

Happy drinking!