PALO ALTO, Calif. - TelAve -- Roch Dog, the standards and certification body for dog friendly hotels, has published What Dog Owners Will Pay For in a Hotel, a hotelier's guide to a peer reviewed study that puts a price on each part of a hotel's dog programme.

The study appeared in Current Issues in Tourism in June 2023, written by a team of five researchers at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. It used a choice experiment with 491 dog owners. Rather than asking owners what they wanted, it showed them complete hotel packages at different prices and worked backwards from thousands of booking choices to the value of every feature. The research was funded by the BK21 FOUR programme of the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the authors declare no conflict of interest.

The results run against most hotel dog offers. Owners would pay about $117 a night more for a hotel with a dedicated play area for dogs, $66 a night more for a lounge where staff mind the dog while the owner goes out, and $146 a night more for that lounge staffed by a certified dog behaviour specialist. They would pay $57 a night less for a room that added a dog bed and steps to the basic bowl and toilet supplies, and $60 less when a welcome gift of treats and toys was added as well. Facilities carried 30 per cent of the booking decision, services 27 per cent, the contents of the room 15 per cent and the room price under one per cent.

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"Everything the owners valued was outside the bedroom, in a space built for the dog or a person trained to look after it," said Guise Bule, founder and CEO of Roch Dog. "Everything they marked down was inside it, in the basket most hotels think of as their dog offer."

The guide explains how the experiment worked, what each finding means for a general manager deciding where to spend, and how the results fit the Roch Dog Friendly Standard, against which Roch Dog assesses and ranks more than 3,000 hotels in 56 countries. It is free to read, with no form to fill in.

Read the guide at https://rochstandard.com/research/what-dog-owners-will-pay-for/

The Roch Dog directory of assessed and ranked dog friendly hotels is at https://rochdog.com