Pet Friendly Doesn’t Mean Anything
The clue is in the words ‘pet friendly’, most hotels won’t let you stay with your cat, and most of their guests bring their dogs. Pet friendly generally means they don’t want to be dog friendly.
It’s crucial to understand the distinction between a genuinely dog friendly hotel and one that merely uses the term‘ pet friendly’. The former is a haven for dog owners, while the latter can be a complete disappointment.
I took it upon myself to verify the dog friendliness of every pet friendly hotel on earth after becoming angry one day. I began certifying and ranking them on a regional basis for Roch. I can see a clear trend after certifying close to a thousand hotels over the least six months.
Hotels that are exceptionally friendly to dogs and provide basic amenities, services, and facilities usually describe themselves as ‘dog friendly’, but hotels that charge a canine tax while providing no basic amenities or services in return often describe themselves as ‘pet friendly’.
Hotels, of course, know that the words pet friendly are meaningless.
Most hotels will not let you stay if you bring your cat, and most travelers do not travel with their pet goldfish, guinea pig, or iguana. They know damn well that 99% of ‘pet parents’ they receive as guests will be bringing dogs with them, so why do they persist in using the term pet friendly?
My feeling is that they don’t want to be dog friendly. They want to charge you an extortionate fee for having the audacity to bring your dog with you, and they don’t want to spend any money providing basic amenities like beds, food, and water bowls, or food for your dog.
I suspect hotels like this avoid using the word dog because they think acknowledging the word might mean they must start extending their hospitality to dogs and their owners. In my view, saying that you are a pet friendly hotel without offering any amenities or services to dogs is like offering a bed without a mattress; it’s not just incomplete, it’s uncomfortable.
In a world where 70%+ of hotels describe themselves as pet friendly, what the vast majority means is that they will tolerate your dog for a steep fee.
Pet friendly simply means dog tolerant.
Writer Lacey Dearie recently asked if “hotels are pet friendly or pet tolerant” because, from the perspective of dog owners, the hotel industry is generally dog tolerant rather than dog friendly. She is right to ask.
Because the entire hotel industry has abused the words pet friendly to the point that they lack any real meaning, dog owners struggle to identify the genuinely dog friendly hotels among them, which isn’t entirely the fault of the hotel industry. The online travel industry is also to blame.
When you search for the terms “pet friendly hotel”, you notice that the big online travel agents, Expedia and Booking, clutter internet search results with pages that do nothing but list their top hotels in any given city. If you were to book into many of those hotels as a dog owner with your dog, you aren’t going to have a good time. They have no idea what a good dog friendly hotel looks like and instead send their customers to any hotel that describes itself as pet friendly without bothering to check and see if it is.
A good example of this is Tripadvisor’s new ‘Best Of The Best’ Pet Friendly Hotels Awards, which they awarded to some of the worst dog friendly hotels in America, oblivious to the fact that they are setting their audience up for disappointment when they check in.
Because I created the world’s first dog-friendly standard and certification process for hotels and have personally certified close to a thousand dog-friendly hotels in the last six months, I can take a data-driven approach to judge whether a hotel is really dog-friendly and perform a comparative analysis of pet-friendly hotels against my data benchmarks.
I measure everything: a hotel’s dog-friendly policies, services, facilities, amenities, access levels, proximity to green spaces, and ancillary services to build up an accurate picture of exactly how dog-friendly a hotel is when compared to others. When I investigated Tripadvisors award-winning list of pet friendly hotels, I discovered that their number one and two pet friendly hotels in America were objectively bad dog friendly hotels.
They lacked any canine inclusivity. Dogs weren’t welcome in the bars, gardens, or public lounges, and dogs had to stay in the room if they were on the premises, but only if you were with them. They didn’t provide basic amenities like bowls, beds, or food, and they both charged canine taxes while calling them cleaning fees. I think dog owners deserve better.
TripAdvisor should be ashamed of themselves.
The industry needs to realize that for dog owners, our dogs aren’t just a pet but our family, and we believe that our family deserves good hospitality. In my mind, a pet friendly hotel that doesn’t cater to the needs of its dog owners is like a restaurant serving food without flavor.
It’s not genuine hospitality.
Many dog owners prefer to leave their dogs at home when they travel because they never know what to expect from a pet-friendly hotel. The more hotels and online travel agents use the term pet-friendly, the more they diminish the efforts of the really good dog-friendly hotels trying to improve the hospitality experience for dog owners and make things difficult for people who want to travel with their dogs.
Forget the words pet friendly; they are meaningless.
