Now Your Dog Can Stay in a PetsHotel
The pet store PetSmart is opening hotels for pets in some of their stores. They have 35 so far, and hope to get up to 300. They also offer doggie day care.
“We wanted the look of the hotels to be upscale, because a lot of our customers are going on vacation and there’s a guilt factor in leaving their pets,” Rowland says. The windows of the lobby area in Bethesda are dressed in a red English chintz print featuring flowers and dogs; the curtains have tiebacks made of leather dog collars. Two club chairs flank a table piled with books. A large-screen TV is encased in a black louvered armoire. The challenge was to find homey materials, because everything from five feet and below has to be regularly washed down because of the bathroom habits of their guests. …
The PetSmart venture is part of the vast American pet money machine, which will generate $38 billion in sales in 2006, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association. About 63 percent of U.S. households own a pet, and pet services are among the fastest-growing parts of the business.
Some people hotels are adopting pet-friendly policies, including monogrammed dog cookies and doggy massages. Country-club-style camps and woodsy resorts accommodate dogs whose owners are on vacation; cat hotels feature multilevel condos, aquariums and luxury theme rooms. Now the urban pet, already pampered with doggie day care and self-cleaning litter boxes, is being offered something billed as a step above your bare-bones kennel facilities.
The article says the hotel costs $23 a night for dogs (less for cats). That’s quite a bit more than the kennel I use when I go on vacation. But I think this will catch on in spite of the extra expense. PetSmart is a known entity to dog owners, and they might rather leave their dogs there than at a kennel they are not familiar with.
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