JM
John McMullin
6 days ago
I’m genuinely surprised this place has 4.8 stars with 800+ reviews because our experience was incredibly disappointing. It makes me call into question if the reviews are even legitimate. I’m sure the business may respond and say our understanding is incorrect, but if that’s the case, their communication with owners is seriously lacking. After several days here, I still couldn’t tell you what a normal day actually looked like for our dogs.
My biggest issue is the complete lack of transparency. You’re paying hundreds of dollars to board your dogs, yet there is very little information about how much time they actually spend outside of their crates. Based on everything we were told and what we were able to observe, my best guess is that the dogs are crated for 20+ hours per day and outside of their crates for less than three hours total. I can’t confirm that because they provide almost no visibility into the dogs’ actual schedule — and that’s exactly the problem.
We were also under the impression that staff leave around 6 PM and return around 6 AM. If that’s accurate, the dogs are potentially alone and crated for roughly 12 hours straight overnight. On Sundays, the published hours are only 3–6 PM, which raised even more questions for us about who is caring for the dogs earlier in the day. Maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, but none of it was clearly explained to us.
We paid extra for the “Luxury” boarding option because this was our dogs’ first stay. It supposedly includes a larger room, comfy raised bed, enrichment activity, and pool time. The problem is we have absolutely no idea what the room looks like, how large it is, how much time they spend in it, or whether the enrichment and pool time actually happened.
We were never shown the boarding area, and much of the facility is fenced or marked to keep customers away. I completely understand that there may be legitimate safety, insurance, or operational reasons owners can’t walk through the boarding area. But then give owners some other form of visibility. Show pictures of the rooms. Have a sample room. Provide a basic daily schedule. Send a report card. Tell us how long the dogs were out that day. There are plenty of ways to give owners transparency without allowing them into restricted areas.
They also have cameras, but whenever we checked hoping to see the dogs outside playing, we never saw dogs out there. We probably check over 12+ times over 4 days at various times and never saw the dogs playing. That doesn’t prove they weren’t taken out, but again, it adds to the feeling that you’re being asked to simply trust that everything described is happening without much ability to validate it.
Pickup made the experience even worse. The person at the front desk did not seem to know our dogs or have any firsthand information about their stay. They were essentially just handed back to us. No report card. No rundown of how they did. No information about eating, behavior, playtime, enrichment, pool time, or anything else.
After leaving your dogs somewhere for several days and paying a premium to do so, I would expect someone to be able to tell me something about their experience.
To be fair, the lobby is clean and organized, the facility looks nice from what customers can see, and our dogs came home okay. They also have very nice-looking cat accommodations visible near the front. But for me, that’s a very low bar for premium boarding.
The entire experience felt like a black box: drop your dogs off, pay a significant amount of money, see very little of where they actually stay or what they actually do, and then pick them up with almost no information.