The Canine Hospitality Playbook

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 the playbook takes its numbers from there: a market worth about $5 billion and growing at 12% a year, properties that take dogs running at 54% occupancy against 48% and about $17 more a night, and roughly $1.9 million a year in extra revenue for a 250 room hotel under cautious assumptions. The cost of getting there is $25,000 to $50,000, about the price of renovating two rooms.

Most hotels capture none of it. Roch Dog has assessed more than 3,000 hotels in 56 countries against one published standard, and about half of the hotels that call themselves pet friendly do not meet its six minimum requirements. The ones that fail are not short of money or space. They have a policy written by whoever handles the insurance, a fee set to discourage, and a dog confined to a room where it earns nothing. The playbook sets out the six operational decisions that fix that, in order, with what each costs and what it returns, and a 90 day plan to make them.

Every figure in the playbook is taken from the Roch Dog research corpus or from a named third party source, and the sources are listed at the end of the document. The revenue model and the investment table are those of The Economics of Dog Friendly Hospitality, applied to a 250 room luxury archetype and a 60 room boutique so that a reader can substitute their own numbers. Grade, fee, weight limit, shared space and service counts are taken from the hotels ranked and published on rochdog.com as of 7 October 2026, shown as counts rather than percentages where the sample is small. The 76% repeat rate the industry quotes is included but marked as indicative trade press data, and the model does not rest on it.

The policy findings draw on The Fine Print, our study of 236 published hotel pet policies, the menu pricing on our archive of ninety published hotel dog menus, and the cost of hosting a dog on our survey of 120 housekeepers. The willingness to pay figures come from a controlled choice experiment with 491 pet owners published in Current Issues in Tourism and should be read as evidence of what owners value rather than a price list.

This third edition rebuilds the playbook on the October 2026 revision of the economics paper. It replaces the loyalty and spend figures of earlier editions with measured occupancy and rate data, drops the equipment list that earlier editions asked hotels to buy, prices everything in US dollars, and adds the dog menu, the regulatory position on hidden fees in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the experiment showing that dog owners pay for shared spaces and people rather than welcome baskets. It also replaces the paid assessment of earlier editions with the free certification that every hotel can now take.

Each section is written to be handed to the person who will do the work: the policy section to whoever writes the policy, the housekeeping section to the head housekeeper, the pricing section to revenue, the 90 day plan to the programme owner. Read the section you need. Then do it.

The opportunity. How big the market is, where the money comes from, a worksheet to calculate your own return with two worked examples, and the running costs.

Policy design. The ten things a dog policy must say, where to publish it, how to write it so any shift can enforce it, and when a weight limit is legitimate.

Pricing. Why the best hotels charge the least, three pricing models, what a dog actually costs you, why the fee now belongs in the headline price, and deposits.

The room and the shared spaces. What goes in the room and why the bowls and the bed are the floor rather than the upsell, the first five minutes at check in, and the highest leverage decision in the playbook: letting the dog into the bar.

Services. Dog walking, dog sitting, the dog menu, grooming, events and retail, and the emergency card.

Staff, cleaning and marketing. Who needs training and for how long, the housekeeping turnover, the difficult moments, the hygiene objection answered without special equipment, and the words that bring the bookings.

Measuring, the 90 day plan and the assessment. The six metrics to track, a week by week plan from decision to measurement, and why independent verification against the standard is what separates a hotel from its pet friendly peers.