Angry Enough To Rank Every Pet Friendly Hotel On The Planet
My best ideas usually come to me when I am angry at something, angry enough to want to do something about it.
A trip to a five-star hotel with my dog made me angry enough to want to do something about the hospitality industry’s ‘pet friendly’ problem.
After believing their dog friendly marketing, I booked and paid for a long weekend at one of their five star resorts with my girlfriend. When I checked in, things seemed normal enough. They gave me a basket containing a cheap toy, some treats, and a thing to hang on my door without warning me where the dog may or may not go in the hotel. In retrospect, I think they were too embarrassed to say anything to me while being ‘pet friendly’.
If they had told me then, I would not have checked in.
My Dog Wasn’t Allowed Anywhere
I unpacked my things and went downstairs to sit in the sunshine on their bar terrace and have a beer. Obviously, I brought my dog down with me. As I walked through the hotel lounge area, a waiter told me I couldn’t have my dog there; I told him to relax and that I was just walking through.
Then, as I sat at a table on the bar terrace, another waiter told me the dog wasn’t allowed to be there. I couldn’t quite believe it; you aren’t often told your dog isn’t allowed to sit outside a bar on their patio or terrace.
I told him to bring me a beer because I had just checked in and to call the manager over so I could speak with him, which he did. As I sat in the sunshine drinking my beer with my dog, the manager came over to me.
I asked him why I had been told twice now that my dog wasn’t welcome in the lounge or the bar terrace, and he told me dogs were not allowed in any of the public areas of the hotel — not the gardens in front or at the back of the hotel, not the lounge areas, the bar, or any of the terraces.
They fully expected my dog to stay in the room during my stay. This was a resort in a fairly isolated spot — it wasn’t in the middle of a town or village. There really was nowhere else to go when you left the resort unless you got a taxi. I had to leave the resort six or seven times a day to give my dog some fresh air so she wasn’t stuck in the room the whole time.
Not only did it ruin my trip, they charged me $100 a night for the privilege of having my dog stay at the hotel with me. I was furious the entire weekend. It deeply bothered me that they had tempted me there with their dog friendly marketing, tried to trap my dog in the room, and then charged me a total of $400 for having the audacity to bring my dog with me.
Hotels do this a lot, price gouge you because they can, while telling you it’s because of the extra cleaning, and offering no services or amenities in return. I tip the cleaning staff at every hotel I stay at to ask them about this.
Their answer is always the same: their standards are so high that they clean everything in the room in exactly the same way every time. There is no extra work if a dog stays in the room unless it causes a mess like a human.
Hotels know this, but they love their canine tax; it's free money.
They charged me a canine tax for a mess that my dog had not yet made, falsely accusing my dog of being a delinquent in the process, while banning my dog from most of the hotel grounds like some sort of criminal.
You Complain, And Nobody Cares
I complained to Wyndham, they didn’t seem to care, I complained to the booking platform I booked through, they didn’t seem to care either. That was the weekend I became so angry that I was left with no other alternative but to grade every dog friendly hotel on the planet, which might seem like an overreaction, but this wasn’t the first time that a dog friendly hotel had made me angry because I had the gall to arrive with my dog.
Frequently, I have been turned away from dog-friendly hotels because my female Labrador was too big or because they only had one dog-friendly room, and it was occupied. When you complain, they tell you that it's in their small print, which, of course, nobody reads. They say they are dog friendly, and we are inclined to take that at face value when booking.
Except you can’t trust the dog friendly tag, not on any major booking platform, not on the many dog friendly hotel directories out there, they are all much more interested in monetizing clicks than checking that the dog friendly hotels in their directory are dog friendly. Most of these directories are affiliates of either Expedia or Booking, they all rely on bad data.
I recently caught TripAdvisor launching their new ‘Best of the Best’ pet-friendly hotel awards, awarding them to some of the worst dog-friendly hotels in America and setting their dog-owning audience up to have a really bad time with their dogs at these hotels. Tripadvisor’s dog friendly awards are completely broken, and it is almost as if they don’t care about dog owners enough to bother checking who they award.
When you fail to meet expectations around dog friendliness and charge dog owners extortionate fees for travelling with their dogs while claiming it's for cleaning and offering nothing else in return, You can understand why many dog owners have completely lost trust in the term ‘pet friendly’.
Because I travel extensively with my dog, I think I experience this issue more often than most. I can see the obvious problem: there is no official definition of the term ‘pet friendly, ' and the hospitality industry abuses the term to make money. The industry did the same thing with the words luxury and sustainability, prompting the necessity for independent certification bodies who verify luxury and certify sustainability.
The last thing the hospitality industry thinks about is being genuinely friendly towards dogs, extending their hospitality to dog owners, considering their needs, and trying to offer them a good service.
In my view, calling yourself a dog friendly hotel and charging a canine tax while offering no services or amenities in return is like offering a hotel bed without a mattress. It is not just inconvenient but uncomfortable.
Dog owners deserve better.
Like A Michelin Star But For Dog Friendly Hotels
Driven by anger, I was determined to do something about it. So, I sat down with my dog and created the world’s first dog-friendly standard and certification process for hotels. I designed it to accurately capture a hotel’s dog-friendly policies, facilities, services, and amenities and score them using a number, which is then used to derive a grade from A+ to D.
Think of it as a Michelin Star but for dog friendly hotels.
That is the story of how I founded The Roch Society, a non-profit society named after the Patron Saint of Dogs, and Roch Dog, the world’s largest directory of certified dog-friendly hotels, certified using the Roch dog-friendly standard and ranked by city, state, and country.
The Roch directory will cover more than 150 countries and shortly be translated into more than 30+ languages, making it the largest dog friendly resource on the planet and making it infinitely easier for dog owners to travel with their dogs, no matter where they might be in the world.
I am determined to drive transparency and accountability into the dog friendly hospitality world, and I am determined to grade and rank every dog-friendly hotel on the planet so that dog owners know exactly where we should be spending our hard-earned money when we travel with our dogs.
The Challenge Ahead
The hospitality industry and the big booking platforms do not seem to care that they are underserving a huge dog friendly market. Tripadvisor is even sending people to bad dog friendly hotels, and most dog friendly directories on the internet are affiliates of Booking or Expedia, and have not evolved since the nineties in any way that helps dog owners.
In the face of this, I am determined to redefine the words ‘dog friendly’ in the hospitality industry because I believe dog owners deserve better.
True hospitality means creating a welcoming environment for all guests, including our four-legged friends; anything less misses the mark.
Because of the Roch Standard, I no longer struggle to find a good dog friendly hotel, and I know exactly what to expect before I book. I now know where to spend my money, and which dog friendly hotels to avoid.
Because I certify and rank them all myself, I know.
Gone are the days when dog owners must rely on dog friendly affiliate click directories. They have something better now: a real dog friendly standard and certification they can trust when they travel with their dog.
Now they have me and Saint Roch looking out for their interests.
