Dog Friendly Performance Across Luxury Hotel Portfolios

Inside a luxury hotel brand, the distance between the best and the worst hotel for a guest with a dog is wider than the distance between the brands themselves. That finding has now held across three portfolios and 111 hotels, measured by one method against one published standard. Roch Dog wrote to every hotel as an ordinary guest planning a stay with a dog and scored the answers against the Roch Dog Friendly Standard. InterContinental runs from the best dog hotel we have ever assessed, an A+ in Miami, to a hotel in Times Square that charges $250 a stay and offers the dog nothing but the room. Fairmont, the one luxury brand that puts dogs in its press releases, runs from an A+ in Santa Monica to thirteen F grades on four continents, and twenty more Fairmonts refuse dogs altogether.

None of it is a brand policy. It is 21 InterContinental policies and 63 Fairmont policies that share a logo. In both portfolios the fee runs from free to $250 with no relationship to what the dog gets, the weight limit from none to a figure that turns away most family dogs, and most hotels miss at least one of the six minimum requirements a dog owner needs in order to book on the strength of the name. Kimpton, under the same roof as InterContinental, is the counterpoint: one brand level policy produces no F grade across 27 hotels. The paper names every hotel in three full leaderboards, explains why the variance exists and what it costs, and sets out the six rules a brand would need to adopt for its name to mean the same thing to a dog owner at every property.

Every hotel was assessed against the Roch Dog Friendly Standard (RDFS-02), a weighted set of questions scored and graded at fixed thresholds, with six minimum requirements determining whether a hotel meets the standard. Most assessments were made by anonymous guest enquiry between July 2025 and October 2026, the rest by self assessment through free certification with every answer checked through the year; unanswered questions score No, so every score is a floor. The data is a snapshot as of 25 October 2026. The InterContinental and Kimpton samples are the hotels we hold; the Fairmont sample is the brand's full published list of 94 hotels, and its figures agree with our dedicated study of that brand, Fairmont and the Four Legged Guest. Which minimum requirement a named hotel missed is reported to the hotel, not published.

This fourth edition reassesses all three portfolios on the data of 25 October 2026 and replaces the third edition of October 2026. It keeps InterContinental, brings Fairmont into line with the dedicated Fairmont study, and sets Kimpton beside them as the counterpoint: a brand inside the same company as InterContinental that keeps its promise to the dog owner through a single one page policy.

The argument is about trust. Brands spend fortunes on standards manuals, inspections and compliance so that a guest who books on the strength of a name gets what the name promised. Dog friendly hospitality has been left outside that system, and the leaderboards show what unmeasured discretion produces: the fee, the weight limit and the welcome all depend on which hotel under the flag you happen to pick, and the guest with the dog, the most loyal guest in the building, learns to trust the hotel instead of the brand.

The Promise of a Brand. Why consistency is what a luxury flag sells, and why dog friendly hospitality has been left outside the brand standards system.

How We Measured. The standard, the anonymous enquiry method, the six minimum requirements, and the snapshot as of 25 October 2026.

InterContinental: Best and Worst Under One Flag. The full 21 hotel leaderboard, Miami against Times Square, the fee that tells you nothing, the access divide, and the hotels that moved once they were measured.

Fairmont: Sixty Three Hotels, No Standard. The full leaderboard, a third meeting the standard, one flag in a dozen currencies, the best and worst Fairmonts, Canada and everywhere else, and the twenty that refuse dogs.

Kimpton: The Counterpoint. The full 27 hotel leaderboard, the three portfolios side by side, and what a single brand level policy does and does not do.

Why the Variance Exists. Nobody owns the dog, the template stops at liability, the franchise excuse, what Hilton's 4,600 hotel decision does and does not cover, and the fee as the whole policy.

What It Costs. The companion paper's revenue model applied to the 38 hotels grading D or F, and the cost of the variance itself in trust.

What a Consistent Brand Dog Policy Looks Like. Six rules, drawn from the six minimum requirements, and the one thing that keeps the floor from sinking.

Conclusion. Three conclusions and a direct ask to IHG and Accor.