Travel with Cats – How We Use Travelocity to Arrange our Trips and Pet-Friendly Hotels

Disclosure: Thank you Travelocity for sponsoring this post. While this was a sponsored opportunity
from Travelocity, all content and opinions expressed here are my own.

We have been traveling full time for more than six years now, with the last two years being on our 37-foot sailboat. While living aboard and sailing in the Caribbean, we adopted two ginger rescue kittens; Captain Ahab in the Florida Keys and little Zissou in the Dominican Republic. Just because we lived on a sailboat didn’t mean that we stopped enjoying nice hotels! Not wanting to leave our furry little boys on their own, we had to start looking for “pet-friendly” hotels to stay in when we felt like having a little bit of luxury!

Now that we have sold our sailboat, we’re off on more adventures with our cats, so here are some of the ways we’ve discovered that Travelocity can help with the search for the best pet-friendly vacation.

After so many years of choosing hotels based only on our own needs, we suddenly had to change our whole definition of “a great hotel.”

Our older cat has traveled with us through Florida, the Bahamas, Turks & Caicos and the Dominican Republic where we adopted another cat that we also brought on our travels all over Puerto Rico.

We love using Travelocity because it’s one of the best all-in-one travel bookings site available for our kind of travel, especially now that we have pets to think about. They also have a price match guarantee, where they will refund the difference if you manage to find an identical trip for less. This gives us confidence that they have confidence in their prices. As well as comparing the best deals on flights, hotels, car rental, and cruises, you can even book vacation packages.

Travelocity sealed the deal with all of their awesome content and helpful articles they have on their blog about traveling with pets.

Here are just some of the ways that we book our pet-friendly travel and vacations:

1. Search for Pet-Friendly Hotels

More and more hotels and travel brands are getting on board with the idea of being “pet-friendly” because more travelers are insisting on taking their pets with them. It used to be a chore to find hotels that accept pets and it was even quite a specialized niche.

However, nowadays the ability to filter hotel search results by “pet-friendly” is built right into the platforms. On Travelocity, all we have to do is click on the “Pets allowed” tab in the filter panel to display only the hotels that accept pets within our location and date selection. Then we can continue to check each hotel as normal, it makes such a huge difference to be able to easily find hotels that allow our cats to stay with us!

2. Look for Flights that allow pets on board

This part of the planning process can be a little bit trickier but is certainly not impossible. Firstly, it’s worth saying that we try our best to reserve our pet-friendly travel for trips where flying is not necessary, simply because it’s quite stressful for cats to deal with. Small dogs, on the other hand, handle flying in the cabin with their owner really well and seem to be enjoying the experience whenever we see them! It’s when flying with our cats becomes unavoidable, like a big relocation, that we have to start searching for pet-friendly flights. Only some airlines are pet-friendly – Lufthansa, JetBlue, Air France, and United Airlines are just some of the airlines that have a pet-friendly policy.

Once you have chosen an airline, check the details of their pet policy, because we have found that many flights will only allow 2 pets on board per flight, so you will need to call the airline to check that they have pet availability for your chosen dates. They will also have specific rules for the size of the carrier and of course the all-important vaccines and health certificates for the country you’re traveling to.

3. Car Rental

It used to be the case that we would rarely rent a car when we traveled because we usually didn’t have a fixed schedule and had time to use public transportation. Now that we have started traveling more with our pets, we need to have more control over our own time and to make sure our cats are as comfortable as possible on the way. The only way to do this is to have our own car, which means car rental and the best thing about rental cars is that they are all pet-friendly! Just don’t let them go to the toilet on the seats, because that may cause you some problems…

4. Package Vacations

Booking a package vacation often gets you a better deal and is much easier than searching for flights, hotels and rentals cars separately to compare prices, then trying to piece it all together and manage several reservations.

When it comes to pet-friendly travel, we limit ourselves to “hotel and car rental packages” because we need to book any pet-friendly flights with the airlines directly. Of course, if the furry ones are staying home then we can use the Package Vacation search function on Travelocity to find great package deals on flights, hotels and car rental all together!

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