How to choose pet boarding software for a small pet hotel

Most small pet hotels aren’t switching from one piece of software to another. They’re switching from a wall calendar, a phone and a chat thread full of vaccination photos. So the question to ask isn’t “which product has the most features?” It’s “will my team actually stop using the calendar?”

This post covers how to make that decision: what to shortlist on, what to ask, and how to trial a product so you find out before you’ve paid for a year.

Before you look at any product

Write down three numbers and one list:

• how many kennels, pens or suites you have
• how many bookings you take in a busy week
• how many of those arrive outside opening hours
• the services you sell beyond the stay itself: grooming, a taxi, a vet visit, a bed to rent

The third number surprises people. When Milo Pet Hotel in Tbilisi counted, almost half of the bookings owners made online arrived in the evening, at night or early in the morning, when nobody was at the desk (their story). If yours looks like that, online booking stops being a nice-to-have.

Milo Pet Hotel's first 69 bookings on Boardinn

• 34 made by owners while the desk was open
• 33 made by owners while the desk was closed
• 2 entered by staff

The checklist

Use it to cut a long list down to two or three products.

• Online booking that respects capacity. Owners book without calling, and every booking counts against your real kennels, so the last space can’t be sold twice. Ask what happens when two people try to book it at the same moment.
• A front-desk view of today. Arrivals, pets in care, departures and the care still to record, on one screen. If answering “who leaves today?” takes three reports, the software was designed for an office, not a desk.
• Vaccination records with reminders. The dates live on the pet’s profile, and the owner gets a reminder before they lapse. Nobody should have to scroll a chat to find a certificate.
• Invoices built from what happened. The bill at check-out should add itself up from the stay, the extras and anything rented, and go out under your name.
• Services you run yourself. Which ones you offer, their prices, hours and capacity, changed by you on a Tuesday afternoon without a support ticket.
• Your currency, timezone and language. Small things, until an invoice is a day out or a confirmation arrives in a language your guests don’t read.
• A way out. Ask for a full export of your data before you sign.

Questions vendors tend to dislike

These four tell you more than a polished demo:

1. Whose name is on the booking page my customers see, and whose domain is it on?
2. If I stop paying, what do I get back, and in what format?
3. When you ship an update, what happens to the prices and services I’ve edited?
4. Where is my data stored, and whose data sits next to it?

None of them has a single right answer. A good vendor still answers each one straight away, without “let me check with the team”.

Run the trial at the desk, not in a meeting

A sales demo shows you the product on its best day. A trial should show you yours. Set it up with your real kennel count and prices, then hand it to the person who checks pets in on a Saturday morning. Give them a week, three overlapping bookings and one awkward change, like an owner who wants to come back two days early.

Then ask them which they’d rather keep, the software or the calendar. If they pick the software without being nudged, you’ve found it.

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We make Boardinn, booking and front-desk software for pet hotels, so we’re not neutral. This is still the checklist we’d hand a friend, and our comparison pages hold other products to it, including where they come out ahead. If you run kennels rather than rooms, the guide to kennel management software goes through the same day part by part.