Erin Express got rid of its bus and is no longer free. Some say it’s still among the best bar crawls in town.

Looking to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a journey across Philly bars, fueled by green beer and Jameson? The options are plentiful.

But before you even buy your first Guinness, it’s going to cost you.

Gone are the days of hopping on a yellow school bus with no up-front cost.

Since the pandemic, there is no longer a free Erin Express, nor does the $5 to $20 ticket to the event’s latest iteration come with transportation.

As potential revelers gauge whether any bar crawl is worth their money, they also have to weed through an increasingly long list of events, deciphering the good crawls from the bad, the legit from the sketchy.

Sometimes, “the poor customer pays for the package and once they arrive somewhere, there is no event. There is nothing,” said Donald Jones, owner of Paddy Whacks Irish Pub, which has locations in the Northeast and on Headhouse Square.

“They can be a scam,” said Erin Quinn, manager of New Deck Tavern in University City. Partly because of that, “the Erin Express is the only type of thing that we’re still involved in. … This is a Philly homegrown thing.”

Now a ticketed event organized by a local promoter, the Erin Express has existed in one form or another for decades. Its current form represents an amalgamation of the long-standing tradition and another Center City event that for years competed with the original. There are other homegrown crawls, too, such as the Northeast Erin Express, run by Jones with other Northeast bar owners and set for March 9.

Dozens more crawls are promoted online with enticing descriptors such as “the Official” and “Philadelphia’s best,” and are advertised with videos of green-clad crawlers set to bagpipe music. Often, event pages indicate that a final list of participating bars won’t be released until the day of the event. Tickets can range from $5 to $75 per person and are purchased online, often from companies that run similar events in other cities.

Sometimes, customers get the perks that are advertised — drink vouchers, waived cover charges, shorter lines, and shamrock-themed trinkets, such as koozies, shot-glass necklaces, beads, and bottle openers. Other times, crawlers say, they get some but not all of what they were promised, with employees at some bars seemingly unaware of the crawl or the deals customers were promised.

And then there are the horror stories.

On New Year’s Eve, Philadelphians with tickets to one bar crawl showed up only to find out that it had been canceled, then struggled to get refunds from a Massachusetts-based organizer.

Misconduct Tavern was listed as the check-in point for that event, despite the bar repeatedly telling the organizer that they didn’t want to be. As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, Misconduct managing partner Nicholas Mezzina is particularly worried about the possibility of people showing up for other events he didn’t sign off on.

“St. Patrick’s Day is a different ball game than New Year’s Eve,” which is “relatively tame” in the city as partiers save some strength for Mummers revelry the next day, he said. On St. Pat’s, “you have people who are drinking a lot more. The staff is really on guard because people want to get wasted.”

If hundreds of people show up for a bar crawl that employees have never heard about, it could be even more chaotic.

Over the last year, “we’ve been getting inundated” with emailed requests to be listed as a stop or check-in location on bar-crawl routes, Mezzina said.

“I think it’s because somebody realized this is easy money,” he said. Now everybody wants in.

Many of these events are listed on Eventbrite, which a spokesperson said is a “self-service platform” where anyone can create an event and set their own refund policy. A team monitors for fraud, the spokesperson added, and users are encouraged to report to Eventbrite any issues with obtaining refunds directly from organizers.

For consumers, “the problem with bar crawls is nobody knows it’s a scam until the day of the bar crawl,” said Rob Wright, owner of Philadelphia-based One Up Events, which runs ticketing for the latest iteration of the Erin Express. “Then, it’s too late.”

People are drawn to pub crawls for the same reason they want to go to an Eagles game or Mummers Parade in person instead of watching from the couch.

Paul Ryan, owner of Smokey Joe’s, put it simply: “People go where people are.”

Ryan’s late brother, Joe, was one of the original organizers of the Erin Express in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. The event grew over time. In its pre-COVID heyday, it saw thousands of people flood the streets of University City two Saturdays in a row for massive block parties. A slate of bars — including the now-closed Blarney Stone and Cavanuagh’s University City — would chip in for buses that would shuttle partiers around for free.

Over the last couple years, Wright said he has sold the first couple hundred Erin Express tickets at $4.95, then incrementally upped the price as the event got closer. They never exceed $20, even last-minutes, and participants receive T-shirts, which cost $19.33 online, and other green swag, which contributes to the sense of camaraderie.

“For me to spin this event up, I don’t just put tickets on sale. I advertise,” said Wright, who got involved after years of doing PR work for Cavanaugh’s. “That’s where most of the money from the tickets actually goes.”

The decision to do away with the buses was partly for liability reasons, Wright said.

Quinn, New Deck’s manager, said the tavern became part of Wright’s version of the Erin Express last year. It was a money-saver for them, she said: It came with advertising, took organizing off their hands, and eliminated not only the cost of the buses but also the cost of bouncers that became needed to keep order on the buses. During the last years of the buses, she added, customers had started calling Ubers more anyway.

And customers seem to love the complimentary festive wear.

“Kids go crazy for that stuff,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how excited they get over a T-shirt and some beads after a couple beers.”

Nearby, Smokey Joe’s will welcome Erin Express participants, Ryan said, but he isn’t sure he’d encourage customers to buy tickets for an event that was once free, organized by bars, and came with transportation.

“No, it’s not worth it,” he said. “Want to buy a T-shirt? Buy a T-shirt.”

Bridget Leneghan, 23, of the Northeast, said bar crawls also eliminate some of the organizing hassle of getting a group together.

”I think it’s just being able to have someone else plan an event and having a time to meet up with your friends,” said Leneghan, whose family owns Leneghan’s Crusader Inn in the Northeast.

She’s enjoyed the Northeast Erin Express, where bars aren’t overly crowded and bus transportation costs only $6, but had less enjoyable experiences waiting in long lines for crowded bars where staff aren’t familiar with what crawl participants had been promised by organizers.

The past two years, Bryn Carlin, 24, of Fishtown, has done the Erin Express in University City and Center City with college friends.

“It was definitely fun,” said Carlin, who works as a nanny. “It was an event and something to be a part of.”

But this year, she said, they’re leaning toward hopping around to individuals bars instead of paying $20 for the third year in a row.

While the Erin Express has drawn criticism over the years for the occasional debauchery that comes with large drinking events, several bar owners reminisced about the crawl’s glory days, noting how much it boosted business and remembering most Erin Express riders as happy, polite, and well-behaved.

The crawl’s long tradition in the city continues to be a draw for younger generations, said Wright, who expects about 10,000 people to buy tickets for this year’s Erin Express crawls on March 16 and 17.

“Erin Express is history,” he said. “If you come out to it and you go to one of the lines, you’ll hear the kids there being like, ‘Bro, I can’t believe it, this is my first Erin Express, and my dad was on the Erin Express.’”

The history also adds some legitimacy, said Wright, who has heard more customers than ever say they’re concerned about getting ripped off.

“This year, I think what’s happened is that people are getting hip to the scammy bar crawl,” he said, “and so we’re actually having a banner year so far.”