There is a pet friendly debate going on in the short term rental world. Some of you swear by the increases in your bookings, while others are fearing the damage from hosting pets. So today we’re gonna answer the question, should I allow pets in my property? And we’re gonna cover all the bases, what you should be charging, damage considerations, housekeeping considerations.

So stay tuned as we dive into all that in today’s show.

Well, welcome back. We’re gonna break down everything you need to know about allowing pets at your short-term rental property. But before we do, let’s just start off with the big one, the nice one. The positive one is that you will see very. Big boosts in your visibility. If you allow pets at your property, and this is really easy to see, you can simply go to Airbnb, you can pull up your market, you can see how many properties are there, you can select the pet filter, and then you can see how many disappear.

So for those of you catching the audio only version, I’ve got my computer screen pulled up. I put in Destin, Florida, a very popular vacation rental destination in the us. I zoomed in on a map location that’s currently giving me over a thousand homes within that map area. Now, if I go to this little filters button, Airbnb’s filters, and I scroll down just a little bit and I click the Allow pets button.

That thousand homes drops to 484 for this map location that I’ve selected. Now imagine you’re one of those 484, and imagine all the people that love to travel with their furry little friends.

So the visibility boosts are massive, and you can do this across a whole bunch of different markets and see that very often, as many as 70% of the listings in that market do not allow pets

The other bright side of this for you hosts out there allowing pets, is that you can very often charge more. We’re gonna get to that in just a second, but before we do, let’s talk about the housekeeping consideration.

Because I know a lot of you are thinking, I have allergies. I don’t want to accept them. My housekeeper would kill me if I turned on the pet filter. And that is the reality for a lot of you. But if you’re struggling in a market, you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. So take a look at your market, see how many properties are not allowing pets.

And decide whether or not you want to, if you’re charging more for that reservation, well, you could also afford to pay your housekeeper a little bit more.

If you are renting a property for a little bit longer, will then our team and I highly recommend that you have a bit of a midterm. Cleaning and you can charge us back to your guests. Make sure it’s in your rental agreement or your house rules. But it’s a way for you to check in on the property. And of course, you want to have a camera at your entrance of your property as well to make sure if your guests said they were showing up with one little Chihuahua, they didn’t show up with four great Danes.

So let’s get to the financial side of things. Yes, you very often can charge more, but it depends. And what does it depend on? It depends on your market and how many other people are already allowing for pets. So you want to use a tool like Price Labs or Air DNA to find this information and you want to build some comp sets of other properties that allow for pets.

And if some top performing properties in your market are allowing for pets and you’re already charging the same rate, then unfortunately you’re probably not going to be able to charge more for allowing pets.

Because when we add a pet fee, it’s really adding to our overall reservation price and people are booking our properties based on the overall reservation price. As you probably know, housekeeping fees, for example, don’t show up in the total price anymore,

so you’ve gotta consider that. But let’s assume that you do have the flexibility because most of the people in that market are not allowing pet. You have some options when it comes to charging for pets, and it does vary a little bit depending on the OTA or the online travel agency. Airbnb, for example,

 allows you to charge a flat rate that spread across the reservation, But that rate cannot exceed your average daily rate. So if you’re charging a hundred dollars per night, you can’t charge a $300 pet fee,

although there is one little workaround you can charge based on what you have in your rental agreement or what Airbnb refers to as their house rules. So let’s say you wanted to charge for two pets. And you allowed up to two pets. Well, you can simply have that in your rental agreement that it’s $50 per night per pet.

And if your guest books your property, they accept those terms and you can charge them via the resolution center for those extra fees.

Now VRBO has a lot more flexibility. You can charge a per stay price. You can charge a per pet price, or you can charge a per night price.

booking.com. Not so easy. Most of you are collecting payments on booking.com through a platform like Stripe, although booking.com does have payments by booking available, depending on the market and depending on your account. But let’s imagine that you are collecting the payments from booking.com, then you do have flexibility similar to putting those arrangements in your house rules.

You put that in your rental agreement on booking.com.

 Next up we wanna make sure that we have some good rules in place. So rules around pets could be size and breed restrictions, could be the number of pets. If you’re on Airbnb, you wanna make sure these are in your house rules. If you’re using a platform outside of that, this is going to be in your rental agreement.

I am gonna go ahead and just read our rules off. I am gonna go ahead and just read our pet rule off to you. You’re more than welcome to copy this, and you’re more than welcome to grab the link in the show notes with all of our house rules that you can use as a template. So ours, if we’re allowing pets in a particular property, it says This is a pet friendly property.

We’re glad if you were able to bring your pet along, but please note we have a few additional rules. Please note that a $50 pet fee will be applied per pet. This helps us get around Airbnb’s flat PET price. Please disclose pets at the time of booking. All pets must be added, your reservation, so the applicable pet fee can be applied.

We are unable to host cats and breeds of dogs deemed aggressive per our insurance policy. No more than two animals. No larger than 20 pounds. Pets are not allowed on furniture. And please clean up after your pets. Do not leave your pet home alone unless crated.

So quite a few potential pet rules in there for you to choose from. Of course, you don’t need to have all of those, but it is good to consider all of them.

Okay, so let’s assume that you decided to allow pets at your property. There’s a couple other things that we want to put in place when it comes to damage protection.

We always recommend having either a damaged waiver, which you can use a company like Wavo or Safely or charging a deposit. Now, if you’re accepting pets, you may want to consider raising that deposit just a little bit. And one of the nice things about a deposit is it’s not raising your total reservation price, right?

So you’re staying more competitive with your local market. But you’re also providing a little bit more protection on the backend.

One last tip. You do wanna make sure that your short-term rental property insurance policy covers pets.

Some policies exclude it entirely, and I know these policies are like a thousand pages these days. So another quick tip, just download that PDF document, give it to chat PT and say, Hey, Mr. Chat PT. Please give me any verbiage that excludes or restricts pets staying at my property.

All right. With those precautions in place, you wanna make sure that you’re marketing your property well online, remember, we wanna stand out. That’s the name of the game because there’s a bajillion short-term rentals out in the world these days, but there’s a lot less. That allow pets. So if that is you, consider adding some photos with pets in your listing.

Consider adding some pet amenities, you know, dog food bowls, all those types of things, doggie, dooo bags and leashes.

 Add the nearest dog park to your local map. Maybe even have a little pet welcome basket.

Those will go a long way, and they will surely help your reviews. Now for all of you out there like, Tim, I don’t care about the visibility or earning more money. I’m just not going to allow pets.

Well, the reality is pets are still going to stay at your property and they will come in the form of a service animal. According to Airbnb’s policies. A service animal doesn’t even necessarily need to be a dog. It could be a cat or a bunny rabbit, or a small horse.Yes, there are no restrictions on service animals, and you are also very limited at what you can and cannot ask someone that’s bringing a service animal.

Now service animals different than emotional support animal. We’ll get to that in just one second. There are only two questions you can ask a guest Bringing a service animal. One is, is if they have the service animal based on a disability.

The first question is. Is a service animal required because of a disability,

and the second is what service task has that animal been trained to do? Now, sometimes by asking these questions, you might filter out some people that are trying to bring a service animal. It’s not actually a service animal, but outside of that, you really don’t have any flexibility, and yes, you’re going to have people staying at your property.

With service animals. Now, what’s the risk of denying them or asking them more questions? Is that your listing can get taken down from Airbnb’s site or any OTA site that has these restrictions, which most of them do it in the form of discrimination. If you don’t allow someone at your property that has a service animal, Airbnb will take you down via their discrimination policy.

so if a guest says they’re coming with a service animal, or you saw them checking into the property on camera and they showed up with a dog and they said, it’s a service animal, you can’t require documentation. You can’t ask for certification. It is very restricted.

Now, where you do have some flexibility is when someone says they’re showing up with an emotional support animal.

Otherwise known as an ESA

with an e, s, a, you do have flexibility. You can ask questions, you can charge. You can’t charge for a service animal.

You can apply your standard pet policies. Now, keep in mind, if you get damage from any type of animal, whether it’s a service animal or emotional support animal, you still have a right to charge for that damage.

If you happen to be in New York or in California, well, I’m sorry, but yeah. Emotional support animals for you are treated just like a service animal. So we wanna make sure we know these little details. To recap, in a nutshell, we want to check our market, see how many properties are actually filtered out. We want to talk to our housekeepers and make sure that they’re comfortable and we’ve worked something out so that they know we’re going to have pets staying at our property.

We need to look at our market data to see how much more we can actually charge. We need to have the right policies in place.

If you want to use our House rules template, just grab them in the link below. We wanna make sure we have some protection in place in case there are damages. So that would be in the form of a deposit or a damage waiver. Of course, you want to check with your insurance. And then lastly, you just want to make sure you or your team or whoever’s helping you out.

Understands the difference between an emotional support animal and a service animal. If you don’t wanna look into all this stuff yourself, well, our team would be happy to help you out with it. We’ve managed properties in over 40 cities, over 60,000 guests now, which you better believe a lot of those showed up with pets.

A lot of them showed up with pets without letting us know. But because we have the right policies in place, we’re able to charge appropriately. You can partner with us by going to st riches.com. There’s a little link there. I’d love to chat with you personally. I hope these insights helped you answer the question, should I or should I not allow pets in my property in 2026? Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.