Dog-friendly hotels: the loyal guest you charge extra and give nothing to
A third of French travellers pick their destination around their dog. Most 'pet-friendly' hotels take a fee and offer nothing back. How to turn dog owners into regulars.
Open your listing on any booking platform. Somewhere in the fine print sits a line: “Pets allowed on request, €15 per night.” To you it is a concession. To a third of French travellers it is the first filter they apply — before the view, before breakfast, before price. And nobody on your team owns it.
The guest who won’t book without the dog
The numbers are recent and they are not marginal. The 2024-2025 Facco-Odoxa barometer counts 79 million pets in France; 30% of French people have a dog and 39% a cat. That is not a niche, it is one household in two.
What those households do with their holidays, Booking.com asked 1,000 French “dog parents” in July 2025: 34% choose their destination according to how dog-friendly it is, and 33% simply do not book if the dog cannot come. One in five says they would travel more often if the dog could join them. On budget, 28% are ready to spend more than €1,150 on a long weekend with their animal. Over one year, the platform logged 7.74 million searches for pet-friendly accommodation. The trade paper L’Écho touristique adds the figure every hotel manager should sit with: 63% of dog owners go on holiday with their dog.
This guest has a trait no other segment has: they are structurally loyal. Finding a hotel that accepts their dog — accepts, not tolerates — has cost them time and disappointments. Once they have found one, they stop looking. They come back, and they tell every dog owner they meet at the park, which is every single day.
Pet-friendly on paper, pet-tolerant in practice
Here is the problem. Roch Dog, a certification body, analysed 1,000 self-declared pet-friendly hotels in 2025. More than 80% charge a fee, from $50 to $250 per stay or per night. A third of them offer two amenities or fewer in return. Only 18% let dogs stay for free. The founder’s line sums it up: “They say they’re dog-friendly, but in reality, they’re dog-tolerant.” A high pet fee usually buys nothing more than the right for the dog to sleep on the floor.
Translate that into guest experience: you charge €15 extra to someone who picked your hotel for precisely this reason, and they find in the room exactly what the guest without a dog finds. They do not complain — they are used to it. But they do not return either, because nothing invites them to. You have turned your best retention prospect into a one-time guest.
What the ones who get it are doing
Destinations have moved faster than hotels. Troyes set up a “Toutourisme” office back in 2007, with free welcome packs and a dog bar. Carcassonne runs guided “Toutou Tours”. The Sunêlia campsites hosted more than 12,000 holidaymakers with their dogs in 2025 and partnered with a veterinary lab for their welcome kits. Club Med is opening three resorts to dogs from summer 2026. When campsites and holiday clubs move, the independent hotel that “allows on request” has a positioning problem.
What these initiatives share is not budget. It is that they treat the dog as a guest with expectations of its own, and the owner as someone whose constraint has been understood.
The minimum programme, room by room
Here is what a real dog welcome costs in a forty-room hotel, and why it pays for itself.
A welcome basket: bowl, washable mat, two bags of treats, a roll of waste bags, a dedicated towel. Thirty euros per kit, reusable, and a photo the guest will post before they have unpacked. Exactly the kind of small gesture that gets talked about.
A neighbourhood map from the dog’s point of view: the three parks where it can run, the on-call vet, the café terrace that puts out a water bowl, the dog-friendly beach and its hours. One A4 sheet, printed, updated twice a year. No other hotel in town has it.
A clear rule on the fee. Either you drop it and join the 18% — an unbeatable sales argument. Or you keep it and state precisely what it buys: the kit, the deeper clean, access to a given area. Guests will pay; they will not pay for nothing.
A field in your guest CRM: the dog’s name, breed, age. “Welcome back, Mrs Martin — and hello Oscar” beats any loyalty points. It is the cheapest and most memorable welcome ritual there is, and it rests on a single line typed in at the first stay.
Finally, a reason to write. The guest with a dog is the most photogenic guest you have, and the most inclined to tell the story of their stay. A postcard printed in your colours, sent from the room to the mother-in-law who “looked after the dog last year” or to friends from the dog club, travels through an entire network of owners — precisely your target. That is what Fidélicarte sets up: the card, the QR code, the real mailing, and the dog’s name in your database for the next visit.
The arithmetic
A dog-owning guest who returns twice a year for four years, three nights at €140, is worth €3,360 in revenue — before counting the word of mouth in a community where everyone talks. The welcome kit, the neighbourhood map and the CRM field cost less than one night. The only real cost is deciding this guest exists, and no longer treating them as an exception you put up with.