What Dog Owners Will Actually Pay For in a Hotel

Every hotel that takes dogs has a theory about what dog owners want, and most of those theories end up in the bedroom: a bed by the window, a pair of bowls, a bag of treats on the pillow and perhaps a branded bandana. In 2023 a team of five researchers at Kyung Hee University in Seoul put a price on those theories. Their answer is useful to anyone choosing where to stay with a dog, because it describes, in dollars a night, what owners like you valued and what they would not pay a penny for.

The Study and How It Worked

The paper is How much are you willing to pay when you travel with a pet? Evidence from a choice experiment, by Yeonwoo Joo, Yunkyoung Jo, Hyeona Jo, Hwi-eun Choi and Yoo-shik Yoon, published in 2023 in Current Issues in Tourism, a peer reviewed journal from Taylor and Francis. It was funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the authors declare no conflict of interest. The journal charges for access, so Roch Dog has published a plain English guide to the study, and every figure below comes from the paper through that guide.

Rather than asking owners what they wanted, which tends to produce a wish list, the team ran a choice experiment, the method economists use to price things not yet on sale. Over the new year of 2022 to 2023, 491 Korean dog owners were shown sets of complete hotel packages, each with a different mix of features and a room rate of $114, $171 or $228 a night, and asked which they would book, or whether they would book none. Thousands of those decisions reveal how much more an owner will pay to have each feature.

Every hotel in the experiment already had a bowl and toilet supplies in the room; the question was what was worth adding. A hotel could offer a play area reserved for dogs, or that play area plus a restaurant the dog could come into; a pet lounge where staff would mind the dog while the owner went out, or the same lounge run by a certified dog behaviour specialist; and in the room, a dog bed and steps, or those plus a welcome gift of treats and toys.

What Owners Would Pay For

The results draw a clean line through the hotel. A play area for dogs was worth about $117 a night more than the plain hotel, and adding a restaurant that took dogs on top of it moved that by a single dollar, to $118. A lounge where the dog would be looked after was worth $66 a night. The same lounge with a certified dog behaviour specialist in charge was worth $146 a night, the largest figure in the study. Taking one from the other, which is our arithmetic rather than the authors', the trained person added $80 a night, more than the lounge itself was worth. The authors' explanation is that owners worry about what can happen when strange dogs share a space, a fight or a bite above all, and someone competent to prevent it is what turns a room into a service worth paying for.

Then come the bedroom extras, and here the numbers turn negative. Adding a bed and steps to the bowl and toilet kit lowered what owners would pay by $57 a night, and adding treats and toys as well lowered it by $60. The ranges around those two figures are tight, which means the sample was not split on the point. It was not that some owners loved the basket and others did not; the basket consistently made the hotel worth less.

When the authors weighed each part of the decision, the facilities carried 30.2 per cent of it, the services 27.2 per cent, the contents of the room 15.1 per cent and the room rate just 0.3 per cent. Owners who found the facilities and services good enough, they concluded, stayed regardless of the price. They were also quite prepared to walk away: booking none of the hotels on offer was itself attractive to them, as you would expect from people used to being disappointed.

Why the Basket Lost Value

A free bed that lowers what a guest will pay looks like a mistake, so it is worth hearing the authors out. A hotel bed or toy has been used by other dogs and carries their scent however well it is washed, so many dogs will not settle on it and their owners pack the dog's own. Food raises a second problem, because a dog with an allergy or a sensitive stomach cannot eat whatever is in the welcome bag, and an owner who has spent years finding a food that works will not experiment on holiday. That explanation is the authors' reading and was not itself tested; the data shows only that these owners did not want more in the room and would not pay for it. None of this is a case against the water bowl, which every hotel in the study had, and a bed still tells you the dog was expected rather than tolerated. But the basket is not what you are really choosing between hotels on.

The Same Answer From Every Kind of Owner

The researchers then sorted owners by how they chose and found three groups: a quarter who prized travelling with the dog and spent heavily on it, a sceptical group of nearly half held back by the number and age of their dogs, and a determined group of just over a quarter who felt the same limits but still counted travelling with the dog as important. All three wanted essentially the same things from a hotel. The authors' explanation is not flattering to the industry: so few places take dogs properly that owners cannot afford to be choosy, and take whatever hotel will have the dog at all.

What It Cannot Tell You

The authors set out the limits themselves. The study was Korean, so the dollar figures are an order of preference rather than a price list for London or Los Angeles. The dogs were overwhelmingly small, 85 per cent under ten kilograms and only sixteen of the 491 large, so an owner with a retriever may care more about outdoor space. A choice experiment records what people say they would book, not what they paid. And it tested four things only, so it says nothing about dog fees, weight limits or sharing the bar and lobby with other guests.

Reading a Hotel With These Numbers

What the study gives an owner is a way of reading a hotel's dog page. These owners put their money on two things, somewhere in the hotel for the dog to be and a person who knew dogs, and neither is in the bedroom. The spaces they priced were reserved for dogs, and the study did not test what a hotel with no room for a playground might offer instead. Our reading, and it is a reading rather than a finding, is that a terrace where the dog can lie under the table, a garden or a lounge that admits dogs does the same job, and that a member of staff who can answer a question at check in without reaching for a binder is the specialist on a smaller scale. When Roch Dog read 236 published hotel pet policies for The Fine Print, most led with what the dog could not do and where it could not go, the opposite of what these owners were looking for.

The authors' own advice to hotels was to invest in space and services for dogs and the people who run them, and to stop spending on supplies for the bedroom. It is also a fair description of the hotel worth booking. Pack the dog's own bed and food, as the authors think most owners already do, and look for the hotel that has given the two of you somewhere to go.