# Roch Dog Standards > Roch Dog publishes the Roch Dog Friendly Standard, the open standard for dog friendly hotels, and independent research on dog friendly hospitality drawn from its assessment of more than 3,000 hotels in 56 countries. Every hotel assessed is ranked A+ to F and published at rochdog.com. Certification is free and the rank cannot be bought. Each research paper below links to its full text in Markdown. The same paper exists as a reader page and a PDF; the Markdown is the complete text and the easiest form to read by machine. Cite the paper by its title and the page URL; each paper also carries a DOI (Zenodo), given in the header of its Markdown copy. ## Research papers - [What Dog Owners Will Pay For in a Hotel](https://rochstandard.com/research/what-dog-owners-will-pay-for/index.md) (8 October 2026): In June 2023 a team of five researchers at Kyung Hee University in Seoul published the most useful piece of academic research a hotelier can read before spending a single dollar on guests who travel with a dog. The paper is How much are you willing to pay when you travel with a pet? Evidence from a choice experiment, written by Yeonwoo Joo, Yunkyoung Jo, Hyeona Jo, Hwi-eun Choi and Yoo-shik Yoon of the university's Smart Tourism Education Platform, and it appeared in Current Issues in Tourism, a peer reviewed journal published by Taylor and Francis and ranked as an A journal on the Australian Business Deans Council list. The work was funded by the BK21 FOUR programme of the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the authors declare no conflict of interest: nobody who sells dog beds or hotel rooms had any hand in it. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/what-dog-owners-will-pay-for/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/what-dog-owners-will-pay-for.pdf - [The Canine Hospitality Playbook](https://rochstandard.com/research/canine-hospitality-playbook/index.md) (October 2026): This is a working guide for general managers, operations directors and owners who want to earn money from guests who travel with a dog. It is not a research paper. The research sits in its companion, The Economics of Dog Friendly Hospitality, and this playbook takes its numbers from there. What this document does is tell you what to change, in what order, what each change costs and what it returns. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/canine-hospitality-playbook/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/canine-hospitality-playbook.pdf - [The Fine Print: An Anatomy of the Hotel Pet Policy](https://rochstandard.com/research/the-hotel-pet-policy/index.md) (1 October 2026): Nothing tells a dog owner they are not really welcome quite like a list of rules, and every hotel that accepts dogs publishes one. The pet policy is the first thing a dog owner reads about your hotel and the document that decides whether they book, yet in most properties it was written once by whoever handles the insurance and has never been looked at since. This paper is the first study of that document: we read 236 published hotel pet policies from 29 countries, set them against Roch Dog's assessments of more than 3,000 hotels, and had the law behind them reviewed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/the-hotel-pet-policy/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/the-hotel-pet-policy.pdf - [The Economics of Dog Friendly Hospitality](https://rochstandard.com/research/economics-of-dog-friendly-hospitality/index.md) (October 2026): Dog owners are the most valuable guests most hotels have never properly served. They stay longer, spend more while they are in the building, and come back at twice the rate of everyone else. Yet half of the hotels that call themselves pet friendly fail a basic assessment of what they actually offer a dog, and the ones charging the most for the privilege tend to deliver the least. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/economics-of-dog-friendly-hospitality/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/economics-of-dog-friendly-hospitality.pdf - [The Highest Margin Plate in the Hotel](https://rochstandard.com/research/the-hotel-dog-food-menu/index.md) (October 2026): Somewhere between the turndown chocolate and the minibar, a new line has appeared on the luxury hotel menu. It is a bowl of grilled chicken and rice, or a filet mignon cut into cubes, and it is not for the guest. It is for the guest's dog. Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, Cheval Blanc Paris, Virgin Hotels and dozens of independents now print a dedicated dog menu and serve it through room service at prices that sit comfortably alongside the human food. This paper argues that the dog food menu is not a novelty. It is one of the highest margin products a hotel kitchen can sell, and its economics rest on a guest who cannot spend anywhere else. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/the-hotel-dog-food-menu/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/the-hotel-dog-food-menu.pdf - [The Coverage Gap in Dog Friendly Hospitality](https://rochstandard.com/research/the-coverage-gap-in-dog-friendly-hospitality/index.md) (6 July 2026): Most hotels that welcome dogs are carrying a liability they do not know they have. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/the-coverage-gap-in-dog-friendly-hospitality/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/the-coverage-gap-in-dog-friendly-hospitality.pdf - [The Million Dollar Mile](https://rochstandard.com/research/million-dollar-mile-dog-walking/index.md) (May 2026): The dog walk is the single most underpriced ancillary in hospitality. The Boston Harbor Hotel, a five-star property on Rowes Wharf, sells in-house dog walks to its guests for ten dollars. A 30-minute walk arranged by a Manhattan concierge through a vetted local provider commands forty-five dollars. The market price for the same service on the consumer apps in midtown is forty dollars. The Boston Harbor Hotel is leaving thirty-five dollars per walk on the table, every walk, every day. They are not alone. Across the global luxury and upscale segment, hotels that have spent millions positioning themselves as pet-friendly have not bothered to productise the one service every dog-owning guest needs every single day of their stay. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/million-dollar-mile-dog-walking/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/million-dollar-mile-dog-walking.pdf - [The Hotel Pet Fee](https://rochstandard.com/research/the-hotel-pet-fee/index.md) (October 2026): Nearly nine hotels in ten charge a guest for bringing a dog, and almost none of them can say what the charge is for. This paper is about that fee: what hotels charge, what the guest gets in return, what a dog actually costs a hotel, and the consumer law that has turned a hidden pet fee from a bad habit into a legal risk. It replaces two earlier Roch Dog papers and rebuilds both on the more than 3,000 hotels we have assessed in 56 countries as of October 2026. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/the-hotel-pet-fee/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/the-hotel-pet-fee.pdf - [Nobody Trusts Pet Friendly](https://rochstandard.com/research/nobody-trusts-pet-friendly/index.md) (October 2026): Searches for "pet friendly hotel" are falling in every mature English speaking market, and searches for "dog friendly hotel" are rising in all of them. That is the finding this paper is built on. In the United States, between 2022 and 2025, interest in "pet friendly hotel" fell 19% while "dog friendly hotel" climbed from 45% of the larger term's interest to 58%. Over the full decade from 2016 the dog term grew 72% while the pet term stood still. In Britain the shift finished before 2016 and the dog term now runs at seven times the pet term. Ireland crossed over in 2018, Australia in 2023. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/nobody-trusts-pet-friendly/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/nobody-trusts-pet-friendly.pdf - [Dog Friendly Performance Across Luxury Hotel Portfolios](https://rochstandard.com/research/intercontinental-dog-friendly-performance/index.md) (October 2026): A luxury hotel brand sells one thing above everything else: the promise that the hotel you book will be like the last one. Brands spend fortunes on standards manuals and inspections to keep that promise, and guests pay a premium for it. This paper asks whether the promise survives the arrival of a dog. In the two luxury portfolios Roch Dog has assessed most completely, it does not. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/intercontinental-dog-friendly-performance/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/intercontinental-dog-friendly-performance.pdf - ["Pet Friendly" Doesn't Translate](https://rochstandard.com/research/pet-friendly-doesnt-translate/index.md) (23 March 2026): "Dog friendly" is one of the most widely used promises in global hospitality. It appears on millions of hotel listings, in dozens of languages, across every major travel market on earth. Travellers trust it every day. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/pet-friendly-doesnt-translate/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/pet-friendly-doesnt-translate.pdf - [How "Pet Friendly" Hotel Awards Mislead Millions of Pet Owners](https://rochstandard.com/research/pay-to-play-dog-friendly-hotel-awards/index.md) (October 2026): Millions of dog owners choose a hotel on the strength of a pet friendly award, and none of the major schemes checks what it is ranking. This paper takes the winners of the two most visible awards, TripAdvisor's Travelers' Choice Best of the Best Pet Friendly Hotels and USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Best Pet Friendly Hotel, in every edition from 2024 to 2026, and sets them against the Roch Dog Friendly Standard, the published standard against which more than 3,000 hotels in 56 countries have been graded A+ to F. Page: https://rochstandard.com/research/pay-to-play-dog-friendly-hotel-awards/. PDF: https://rochstandard.com/static/pay-to-play-dog-friendly-hotel-awards.pdf ## The standard - [The Dog Friendly Standard](https://rochstandard.com/standard/): the standard itself, with its six minimum requirements and the questions behind the rank. - [Assessment](https://rochstandard.comundefined): how a hotel is assessed and ranked. - [Certification](https://rochstandard.com/certification/): free certification for any hotel. - [Definitions](https://rochstandard.com/definitions/): the terms the standard uses. - [Questions and answers](https://rochstandard.com/qa/): plain answers about the standard. ## Optional - [Full text of every paper](https://rochstandard.com/llms-full.txt): all the papers above in one file. - [Hotel rankings](https://rochdog.com/): every assessed hotel with its rank and review.