RDWP-PFD-01 · Hotelier's Reading · November 2026

More Than Permission: What Pet Friendly Means to the People Who Travel With Pets

In short

Almost every hotel that takes a dog calls itself pet friendly, and until October 2026 nobody had defined the phrase. That month the International Journal of Hospitality Management published the first academic definition of pet friendly, by Nikolaos Iason Koufodontis of the University of the Aegean, built from a review of the whole field and a survey of 1,041 people in 66 countries. This paper reads it for the people who run hotels.

People agree on the core. What turns a hotel that allows pets into a hotel that is pet friendly is everything around the permission: the right facilities, clear rules, staff who know what they are doing and the basic amenities. Nine in ten would call a hotel pet friendly if it admits the pet, says plainly what its rules are and provides the basics.

They disagree at the edges, and the edges are where a hotel loses guests. Only 12% would call a hotel pet friendly if it allows dogs under 10 kilograms but not cats, and only 11.7% if it advertises as pet friendly and then charges a very high fee. The paper separates rules, which govern how a pet behaves inside the welcome, from restrictions, which decide who is welcome at all, and closes with what a hotel should do and where the Roch Dog Friendly Standard sits against the definition.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure is from Koufodontis's paper and its supplementary material, reported as he reports it. His systematic review screened some 6,000 academic sources to the end of 2025, assessed 364 in full and classed 162 as core. His survey of 1,041 people in 66 countries, run through Prolific and weighted by population and by how much each country travels, asked which animals the phrase covers, what makes a place genuinely pet friendly, and whether nine everyday situations deserve the label.

Where this paper says what a finding means for a hotel, that is Roch Dog's reading, not his claim, and the sections on the Roch Dog Friendly Standard are ours alone. The paper was reviewed before publication by the author of the original study, Nikolaos Iason Koufodontis, and is written with his agreement. His paper is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Introduction

The phrase pet friendly did not come out of research. It was in newspaper travel columns by 1994 and a standard hotel marketing label by the 2000s, and in all that time it meant whatever the hotel using it wanted it to mean. When Koufodontis traced the definitions academics had used, every one had been borrowed, from a commercial website, a dictionary or a master's thesis, and most reduced the phrase either to permission or to amenities.

This paper is written for general managers, owners and the people who draft hotel pet policy. It sets out what the people who travel with pets say the label should mean, where they draw the line, how much that line moves between America, Europe and Asia, and what a hotel should change so that the label it has been using all along is one it has earned.

Contents

  1. A Label Older Than Its Definition. How pet friendly came out of the travel pages, why the research arrived late, and how every definition in circulation was borrowed.
  2. The Study, and the Nine Situations It Tested. Who was asked, how the sample was weighted, and the nine everyday situations they judged.
  3. Which Animals the Phrase Covers. Why the guest's own animal is the core, why a hotel cat is not a pet policy, and where service animals sit.
  4. What Makes a Hotel Pet Friendly. Facilities, clear rules, staff and the basics, in the order guests named them, and the guest without a pet.
  5. Where Guests Draw the Line. The fees and selective restrictions that score lowest, the difference between a rule and a restriction, and why the hotel judges itself too kindly.
  6. The Regional Divide. Why Americans accept far more restriction than Europeans or Asians, and what that means for a hotel with international guests.
  7. What a Hotel Should Do. Publish the rules, get the basics right before the extras, train the people guests meet, and make every restriction earn its place.
  8. The Definition in Practice. The certification criteria and benchmarks the paper calls for, and how the six minimum requirements of the Roch Dog Friendly Standard answer them.
  9. Conclusion. Permission is not enough, restrictions cost more than managers think, and the one change any hotel can make this week.
Published by Roch Dog RDWP-PFD-01 · Version 1.0 · November 2026 · Guise Bule