The Worst Room

Your worst stock at par

The pet room is usually the room you cannot easily sell: ground floor, by the service areas, tired. Routing dog guests into it looks efficient, and it charges par for inventory you discount to everyone else. The guest paying full rate for your weakest room works out the maths immediately, and resents it precisely because they paid full rate.

Segregation makes the smell

Clustering every animal into the same few rooms concentrates odour and wear into them, which is why "do pet rooms smell" is a question guests ask each other and answer yes. You did not inherit a smelly room. You built one, by funnelling every dog through the same door, and then you sold it as the pet-friendly option.

The floor penalty is a tell

A policy that confines dogs to set floors and fines them for straying reads to the guest as exactly what it is: containment, not hospitality. It tells them you consider their dog a contaminant to be quarantined. That is not the message a property chasing the segment wants on the record, and guests put it on the record.

What you forfeit

Dog-owning guests return at high rates and spend well, but only when the experience is good. The worst room is not a good experience, and a segment that would have come back does not come back to the room by the bins. You are spending your most loyal guests to protect your least sellable inventory. The trade is backwards.

Give them a real room

The correction is unglamorous and cheap: place dog guests in normal inventory, rotate and deep-clean properly instead of quarantining, and stop charging par for the room you would otherwise discount. A property that gives a dog a decent room is remembered for it, and remembered guests are the entire economics of the segment.

Sources

1. Guests on whether "pet rooms" smell, and why they do. Reddit, r/marriott.
2. Pet-Inclusive Housing Initiative, 2021 report on pet damage rates and repair costs. Full report.