The end of 2024 is leaving a lot of dog daycare and boarding facilities reviewing their numbers and noticing a trend of declined demand for both daycare and boarding services. The pent-up travel demand from COVID lockdowns is over and many of the COVID adoption puppies have settled into their new homes and routines; leading pet parents to keep them home vs sending them to daycare. To make things even harder, daycare and boarding market saturation with new facilities opening across all markets means less dogs and more choices in your community.
Knowing that most pet care facilities depend on dog daycare to boost revenue during the slowdown of non-peak boarding seasons, it is essential to have a strategy in place to address the declining demand and to differentiate your business from ever-growing competition.
Below are several strategies pet care businesses can implement to ensure your pet care business thrives in 2025.
Creating Demand for Dog Daycare Experiences
Dog daycare is the only pet care service that you can create demand for and if you design a program for themed enrichment and other events/activities, you will differentiate your business from the competition and drive attendance from customers that otherwise wouldn’t be booking because they see value in their dog’s participation in your fun and engaging themed services.
To get some real world examples of themed enrichment programs, check out this detailed article we shared earlier this year on how to structure your program, ideas on themes and learn how to drive demand for your unique daycare program.
Optimizing Your Phone Call Experience
Once you have differentiated your business and customers have a reason to call, you need to be sure that the people on your team who answer the phone are adequately trained to build rapport, share the unique value of your facility experience and convert them into customers.
In the pet care industry, phone calls are the go-to for 90% of new customers first contact. As a business owner or manager of a dog daycare facility, you need to do an honest assessment of the resources provided to ensure this first experience with your brand is in line with the value and experience you want to provide. Have you equipped them with the right training, tools and feedback to be successful? Are you managing and measuring their success to ensure they are the right people to be the voice of your business?
To ensure your phone call experience is consistent and great, you should evaluate often (every two weeks) by having friends and family place a “secret shopper” call to inquire about your services. Below are the areas that you want to evaluate the conversation.
- How do they answer the phone? Professional & friendly tone?
- Are they saying something like “Thank you for calling ABC Pet Resort, my name is Garret, how can I help you?”
- How well do they tell your company story and the way you are different from other facilities in the area?
- Are they highlighting your dog to staff ratios?
- Are they talking about the types of training/certifications that all employees have?
- Do they talk about your unique services, events and enrichment themes that occur every month?
- Do they share cleaning protocols, service rotations, luxury facility highlights (air circulation, floor surfaces, playgroup sizes, etc)?
- How conversational are they in capturing the necessary information required for your kennel software?
- Are they conversational in capturing the appropriate information to plug into your kennel software to ensure you can follow-up with emails, text messages and ensure all your pricing rules are followed based upon size, breed, age, spayed/neutered status and socialization experience?
- Are they asking for the new customer commitment to schedule a tour or discovery day to evaluate the appropriate playgroup for the pup?
- How well do they handle reluctance and are they able to control the conversation? This is one of the most important aspects, because typically new customers come with their own agenda (pricing questions).
- You want to listen to them say things like “… I would be happy to go over pricing with you, would you mind if I share a bit more about how we are different from other facilities you have used or spoken to in the past.”
- How do they handle complaints/comments about the pricing of services?
- For existing customers are they prompting/recommending enrichment services to send the dog home the best version of themselves?
- For boarding appointments are they recommending a departure grooming service to ensure the dogs go home looking and smelling their best?
Having the right or wrong person answering your phone calls can boost profit or kill growth for your pet care business. Make sure you are intentional and provide the right type of guidance and resources to ensure your front desk person is a driver of growth and profitable revenue.
Designing an Ideal Customer Tour Experience
Talking to hundreds of pet care facility owners, you will hear a variety of opinions about delivering facility tours.
- Facility tours of pet resorts can be disruptive.
- Facility tours increase the importance of cleaning protocols.
- Facility tours of pet resorts require specific staff to deliver.
- Facility tours don’t always lead to new customers.
And while the above is true, the reality is that delivering facility tours is a critical component to growing your business and earning the trust & loyalty of new customers. Just like staffing your front desk (not everyone is right for the position), the same applies to which team members are a good fit to deliver facility tours. Below are several recommendations for you to design the appropriate customer experience for your facility tour process.
- When a facility tour is booked, you should always send out an email or text message letting the pet parent know what to expect.
- Is this a tour where they should bring their dog or leave them home?
- How long should they expect to spend during the tour process?
- What are you going to show them and educate pet parents on what they should be thinking about when evaluating your facility and others they may visit. This is a key opportunity to highlight.
Delivering an Amazing 10 Stop Facility Tour
When a customer arrives for a tour, make sure your staff comes out from behind the desk to shake the customers hand, makes eye contact and thanks them for coming in.
- Bonus points if your staff is dressed in your branded company shirt/outfit.
- Extra bonus points if you can give them a booklet that has all the amazing details about your facility (services, packages, hours, events, important policies, etc)
Facility Tour Stop 1: Lobby
- Share information about your check-in and check-out process.
- Leave the dog on the leash until the runner grabs the dog to take them to their playgroup or luxury suite.
- Give space to other customers check in ahead of you to ensure safety.
- Highlight that door control is key when moving their pet throughout the facility.
- Let them know you want them to book instead of just dropping in so that you can maintain the appropriate playgroups and staffing ratios.
Facility Tour Stop 2: Brag Wall
Add a Brag Wall in your lobby where customers can see pictures of other customers and their dog. This is a great way for them to potentially recognize friends who also come here and when that occurs it’s a great way to encourage additional days of daycare when their friends are also coming in for the day.
Facility Tour Stop 3: Cubby System
This is a great opportunity for you to let customers know they can bring with them and what they should leave at home. You show the cubby system so they know that they shouldn’t bring in any bulky items that are hard to wash and hard to store.
Facility Tour Stop 4: Playroom Viewing Window
To keep the energy level down with your playgroups and not to disrupt the flow of your daycare program, allow pet parents to view the various daycare playgroups, the games that are being played, the interaction of daycare attendants with the dogs. Having play structures (puppy playground), having Blue9 Klimb tables configured, having tunnels, etc… If your team has training experience, it would be ideal to also talk about how your processes support improved behavior in the pets who regularly attend daycare. If you can time tours with group sit activities, roll call door release (dogs all sit on one side of the door and come into the playgroup one at a time when their name is called), small group bacon bubbles or other beneficial activities; it will really set your facility apart from competitors in the area.
Facility Tour Stop 5: Outdoor Play Yards
During this tour stop you want to explain what a day in the life of a dog looks like at your facility. You want them to understand the amount of time spent socializing, participating in enrichment services and why it’s important, and when the dogs rest to balance the energy of the group. This is also a good time to describe the safety fencing, play equipment and common games/activities that are used to engage the dogs, how dogs are sheltered from excessive heat or rain and explain how dogs are monitored during outdoor time.
Facility Tour Stop 6: Indoor Suites
As your team leads the pet parent through the indoor suites, you will really want to drill into the cleaning protocols which allow the place to smell great, the air circulation and purification details and rotation schedules so they understand the dogs has a mix of time inside their luxury suite and outside in play yards with staff (and where appropriate other dogs).
Facility Tour Stop 7: Food & Medication Prep Areas
Review your process for food prep and delivery. Highlight the special care that is taken to support special diets and medication requirements. You can show them a sample copy of feeding and medication reports (digitally if you are using digital charting or paper copy if your current kennel software doesn’t support it) so they can see how organized the team. You will also want to highlight protocols for when dogs are not eating all of their food; are you adding toppers to encourage eating?
Facility Tour Stop 8: Grooming Room
Grooming is a critical part of revenue for most daycare and boarding facilities. You will highlight the qualifications of your grooming team, the grooming services available along with recommended cadence for baths, nails and grooms (every 4-5 weeks). If you identify their dog as anxious, then talk about the enrichment services you provide to ensure their dog is comfortable and if their dog is a senior dog, highlight the TLC provided and the extra time taken where needed. If you have nail trim, bath or grooming packages, it would be great to grab a flyer in the grooming room and hand it to the customer so they can see pricing.
Facility Tour Stop 9: Training Areas
If you offer training services, then make sure you talk about your training methodology, the types of services you offer to help improve the relationship between the pets and their parents (daytrain, day board, board & train, private lessons and group classes). If your trainer works across the regular daycare program, it would be great to highlight that all daycare dogs are getting varied levels of training just by coming to daycare on a regular basis.
Facility Tour Stop 10: Quiet Area for Q&A
Once you have taken the pet parent thru the entire facility, you want to find a quiet place for them to ask any additional questions, for you to share information about your Discovery Day/Day Evaluation process, the packages that are available for new customers (make sure you have designed a can’t resist intro to daycare package), highlight if you have cameras for them to peak in on their dog, talk to them about your online booking within your kennel software or if you have a mobile app for your dog daycare, share critical policies and talk about special holiday events that you offer.
The #1 goal of every facility tour is to book their dog(s) for a Discovery Day/Daycare Evaluation. If you try to schedule it and you get any feedback, be direct and ask for details about why they might be hesitant so you can continue to improve your tour process and address anything they saw that made them uncomfortable with moving forward. **Bonus points if your tour ends with the customer getting a personalized Tour Gift. This could be branded toys, treats or other dog appropriate items that lets them know you value them as a customer.
Creating Special Offers for New Daycare Customers
To continue to grow your dog daycare business, you really need to deliver 5 Discovery Days/Day Evaluations per week. Creating special offers for new customers is critical to driving the appropriate volume of new dogs in the door. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to offer a “First Day Free” offer.
- Make sure special offers are listed on your website
- Create flyers with QR codes and place them in areas where your customers go. These could be local veterinary offices, pet food stores, dog parks, grocery stores, etc.…
- Promote your new customer special offers on your social media page (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Nextdoor) and be sure to include photos and videos that show how much fun dogs have when their parents choose to bring them to your facility.
- Send out text and email marketing to showcase your special offers. Give your prospective new pet parents a reason and remind that they need to stop by and give it a try.
- Attend and Host special events in your community. These could be parades, local schools, pet focused events, shelter adoption events and more.
Once you have the attention of your community through the above marketing efforts you then need to focus on getting a decent commitment from them through a package purchase. Pet parents who purchase a package as a new customer are 60% more likely to continue the purchase of additional daycare packages moving forward. You really want to create an Intro to Daycare package that is so enticing that they can’t say no.
I prefer to NOT discount an intro to daycare package, but instead I like to build value for the various services offered to build loyalty and let them have the ideal experience for the first 3 weeks as a new customer. Below are what I would like to see in an Intro to Daycare package.
- 6-day package, where you say something like “Our intro to daycare package is good for a month and designed for your pup to come and play 2x per week for 3 weeks. This allows them to get comfortable with playgroups, allows us to get to know their personality and playstyle and experience our enrichment program so we can send them home the best version of themselves every day”.
- For each of the 6 days, they should be provided with 1 or 2 daily enrichment activities.
- For each of the 6 days, they should receive a Digital report card (before noon) to show the pet parent how much fun the dog is having.
- For one of the 6 days, you should provide a free bath and nail trim + a bandana or bow (ideally with your brand logo/colors). Bonus points if you do pawlish and get permission from the pet parent as that will allow the pet parent to become an instant brand advocate and talk about your facility to friends, family and neighbors.
- Tag the owner on social media and post a few pictures of their dog.
Pet Care Industry Evolution
The pet care industry is evolving fast, and standing out takes more than just a great facility—it takes strategy, creativity, and a little extra tail-wagging appeal. But don’t worry, the opportunities are endless! Pet parents are spending more on their furry companions every year (and let’s be honest, that trend isn’t slowing down anytime soon). With smart planning and a willingness to adapt, your business can become the go-to spot for devoted pet parents—today, tomorrow, and for years to come. So, gear up, think big, and get ready to lead the pack!
