What to Pack When Your Pet Goes Into Boarding: A Checklist

A pet boarding checklist is mostly a list of small things, and the small things are what go wrong. Nobody forgets the animal. People forget the food scoop, the certificate, and the second phone number.

This page assumes the booking is already made and the facility is already chosen. It is about the bag you hand over at the door, written from the receiving side — the things we are glad to be given, and the things that arrive and cause a problem.

Food, and more of it than you think

Bring his own food, in the amount that covers the whole stay plus three or four days. Flights get moved, and a stay extended by two nights should not be the moment his diet changes.

Bring it in a sealed container rather than an open bag, and label the container with his name and how much he gets at each meal. If he eats wet food, count the pouches and say so. If he is on a prescription diet, write down which one and why, because a substitution that looks harmless to a kind member of staff may not be.

Do not use the stay as an opportunity to improve his diet. A change of food and a change of address in the same week produces an upset stomach that then looks like something else, and everybody spends the week guessing.

Medication travels in its own packaging

Everything he takes should arrive in the container it was dispensed in, with the label from the clinic that prescribed it still attached. Loose tablets in a bag, or a week’s worth in a pill organiser, tell us nothing about what they are or who authorised them.

With it, write down what he has, when he has it, and how it goes in — wrapped in food, crushed, straight into the mouth. Owners know this by heart and forget that nobody else does. Add the name of the clinic that prescribes for him, so his own vet can be reached if a question comes up, and what a medical stay involves is on our boarding service page.

The documents are the half people forget

In the UAE this is not a formality. Bring the vaccination record, and bring the rabies certificate specifically — it is a legal document here, it is what municipality registration rests on, and every reputable facility will want to see that it is current before he goes in.

Photograph both and keep the pictures on your phone as well. Records get left in a drawer in another country, or in the car, or with the person who did the drop-off while you were already at the airport. A photograph will not always be accepted in place of the original, but it settles a question quickly when the original is thirty minutes away.

If his registration tag is not current, sort that out before the trip rather than at the counter. It is the one item on this list that nobody can fix for you on the day.

One thing that smells of home, and a short list of what to leave behind

Bring a blanket or a worn t-shirt that has not been washed. The smell is the point, and it does more for a nervous animal in the first night than any new toy will.

Leave the expensive collar, the tracking device and anything with sentimental value at home — kennels and carriers are hard on both, and losing them makes a stay memorable for the wrong reason. Leave new toys at home too. A toy he has never seen is not comforting, and a soft toy he can pull apart unsupervised is a hazard rather than company. The same goes for chews and rawhide, which are fine under your eye at home and not fine in a room where nobody is watching him swallow.

A second person who can say yes

Give the facility a second contact, and tell that person they are on the list. This is the item owners skip and regret.

You will be on a plane, in a meeting, or asleep in a time zone eight hours away, and a decision may need to be made about examining or treating him. Leave a name and a number for someone reachable in the country, and be explicit about what they are allowed to authorise on your behalf. Leave your own number in international format with the country code, along with your travel dates and the address you can actually be reached at — a hotel switchboard is more use than a mobile with roaming switched off.

What it costs

Boarding at Petbook is AED 60 per night for a cat or a dog who needs no medication, one rate for every size and weight. A stay that involves medication or veterinary attention is quoted on what the case needs — message us on WhatsApp for a same-day quote.

Where it all gets handed over

Allow more time at drop-off than the handover appears to need. Ten minutes of proper questions at the counter — what he eats, what he takes, what frightens him, who to ring — prevents most of what goes wrong later, and it is time nobody has if you arrive twenty minutes before a flight.

What a stay looks like from the inside is set out separately for each species, on our cat boarding in Dubai and dog boarding in Dubai pages.