Traveling with a pet often brings unexpected challenges. Many hotels claim to be pet-friendly but fail to meet basic expectations. Guests arrive to find hidden fees, strict breed restrictions, or a lack of basic amenities. This disconnect frustrates dog owners and damages hotel reputations. A clear, reliable standard is missing in the hospitality industry.
Roch Dog is the standards and certification body for dog friendly hotels, that grades hotels on how dog friendly they actually are against a published standard and 50-plus data points per property. It has assessed 3,000+ hotels across 56 countries, hundreds of them in Canada. Founder Guise Bule also runs Let Dogs In, a volunteer campaign to legalise dogs inside Canadian bars and taprooms that have no kitchen. We asked him what the Canadian assessments found, which hotels are genuinely good, and why he publishes the names of the ones that are not.
Q: You have assessed hundreds of hotels in Canada. What did the data actually say?
Guise Bule: That "pet friendly" is a booking filter rather than an operating standard. We grade every hotel the same way and we publish the result whether the hotel enjoys it or not. In Canada, one property reached an A, the Fairmont Banff Springs, and it is genuinely one of the best dog hotels we have assessed anywhere in the world, not just in Canada. Twenty-four more reached a B. But just over half the hotels we looked at ranked F. And it is not a budget problem. The Ritz-Carlton Toronto ranks F. InterContinental Montreal ranks F. The Westin Bayshore in Vancouver ranks F. Four Seasons Toronto reaches a C. Spending more does not get your dog a better stay, and that is the finding that surprises Canadians most.
Q: How do you assess a hotel? What is actually being measured?
Guise Bule: Fifty-plus data points per property, every one of them something a guest could verify themselves. Is the pet policy published on your own website or must I telephone you for it. What is the fee, the deposit, the weight limit, the number of dogs allowed per room. Where can the dog physically go, lobby, bar, patio, restaurant. May he be left alone in the room. Are there bowls, a bed, waste bags, somewhere to relieve himself. Nothing subjective, no photographs of a golden retriever on a duvet. We do not charge a hotel to be assessed and no hotel can buy a better grade. The grade is arithmetic, which is why dog owners trust it.
Q: You are a British company assessing Canadian hotels. How does Canada compare to home?
Guise Bule: Canada is ahead of the United States on our numbers and behind Britain, and the gap with Britain is not about attitude. Canadians love dogs as much as anyone on earth, more than most. The difference is proactivity. A British country pub has spent two hundred years assuming the dog is coming in, so the water bowl by the door is not a policy, it is furniture. Canada tends to permit the dog without preparing for him, and permission without preparation is where guests get caught out. That is a fixable difference and it is being fixed. What we bring is the standard itself, a British benchmark applied identically in every market, so a Canadian hotel is measured against Britain and Japan rather than against the hotel across the street.
Q: Who in Canada is getting it right?
Guise Bule: The hotels that have thought about the dog before he arrives. They answer the boring questions unprompted. Where does he go at six in the morning in February. May he stay in the room while I have dinner. Is there water at the desk. Fairmont Banff Springs does this properly. So do the Royal York in Toronto, the Fairmont Chateau Whistler, the Palliser in Calgary and the Ace in Toronto, the Paradox in Vancouver, and Hotel Zed in Tofino. Different cities, wildly different room rates, the same instinct. Very little of what separates them costs real money. It is a policy written by somebody who has owned a dog rather than by somebody minimising liability.
Q: And where do the failures happen, once the guest is standing at the desk?
Guise Bule: Four things, endlessly. A weight limit around 25 or 30lb, which quietly excludes most family dogs. Restricted areas, so the dog is in the building but not the lobby, bar or patio, which means one of you eats alone in the room every night. No leaving the dog unattended, which turns a two-night stay into a logistics puzzle. And fees that appear at check-in. Every one of those is knowable before booking and almost none of it is published. One major hotel chain, Germain Hotels, even has hostile policies that impose fines on dog owners for breaking their rules. The gap between what the website implies and what the front desk says is the entire problem.
Q: Fees are the number one complaint from travellers with dogs. What is the fix?
Guise Bule: Publish them, in full, on the page where I book. I have no objection to a hotel charging for a dog. I object to a hotel hiding it. A stated 75 dollar cleaning fee is fair dealing. The same fee revealed at the desk after a nine-hour drive through the Rockies is a bait and switch, and it is the fastest way to lose a guest for life. We score for it directly. A hotel that publishes its policy, its fee, its deposit and its dog limit on its own website scores better than one that does not, whatever the beds are like. Transparency is cheap. It costs a paragraph.
Q: You also run Let Dogs In, which is about bars rather than hotels. Why?
Guise Bule: Because the hotel is only half the trip. You check in with your dog, then you want a pint, and every door in town shuts. Most Canadians do not realise the rule they have run into was written for restaurant kitchens. The genuine concern is contamination where food is being prepared, and plenty of bars and taprooms have no kitchen at all. No kitchen, no food prep, no reason to leave a dog outside in a Canadian February. And Canada is already ahead here. Ontario changed its rules in 2020, and a Calgary bar has done this safely for nearly a decade. We are asking the rest of the country to catch up with Ontario and Calgary, not to copy anybody abroad. Please sign our petition at https://letdogsin.com to support us!
Q: What do you say to the Canadian who simply does not want a dog near them in a bar?
That they are entitled to their evening and the standard is written to protect it. Dogs stay leashed and on the floor, well away from the bar. There is a dog-free zone for anyone who would rather not be near one. Vaccinated dogs only. Any aggression and the dog leaves, no second chances. And no bar is compelled to take part, ever. It remains the venue's choice, every time. We are not asking to force dogs on anybody, we are asking to remove a rule that stops a bar saying yes where it is perfectly safe to. The campaign is volunteer-run, non-profit, and costs the Canadian public nothing.
Q: Is the industry keeping pace with how Canadians actually live?
Guise Bule: Not yet, and the numbers are blunt about it. There are 7.2 million dogs in Canadian homes, in more than half of all households. Sixty-two percent of Canadian dog owners say it is hard to find places that welcome their dog. Fifty-seven percent say they would go out more often if more places said yes. That is demand sitting on the table unspent because of a rule nobody has revisited in thirty years. The hotels and bars that fix this are not doing charity, they are taking a booking off the business down the street.
Q: A general manager reads this, looks up their hotel and finds an F. What should they do on Monday morning?
Guise Bule: Ring us. An F is a starting position, not a punishment, and it is usually not a reflection of how much the staff like dogs. It is a reflection of a policy written in a hurry years ago and never revisited. Several Canadian hotels have come back to us after a poor grade, published a proper policy, dropped an arbitrary weight limit, put bowls and a bed in the room, and been regraded. We do not charge them to be looked at again. The whole point of a standard is that it tells you exactly what to fix, in order. Most of the distance between an F and a B in this country is a fortnight of work and no capital expenditure at all.
Q: What happens next in Canada?
Guise Bule: We keep assessing and we keep publishing, including the grades hotels do not enjoy reading, because a certification that only prints good news is worthless. Anyone can look up where their hotel ranks at rochdog.com. Anyone who thinks a well-behaved dog belongs in a bar with no kitchen can put their name to it at letdogsin.com. Those are two halves of the same argument. Allowed is not the same as welcome, and on the evidence Canada is closer to fixing that than it thinks.
Roch Dog's Canadian rankings are published at rochdog.com. The Let Dogs In campaign and its white paper are at letdogsin.com.
