A growing market is undoubtedly formed by tourists travelling with their pets along.

Therefore, if you own a villa or, more generally, a holiday accommodation located in coastal or rural areas, and you have outdoor spaces, why not considering the idea of hooking your property up to the growing trend of the so-called “pet friendly” holiday villas. 

Here are some useful tips on how and why to make your property a cosy place for our four-legged friends:

The first significant benefit in welcoming pets in your holiday home in Sicily, is definitely the approach you might have to a wider market target which carries on expanding.

You can maximize your earnings on an annual basis, by charging customers a small extra fee for the stay of their pet. This is justified by all the extra cleaning your property will be subject to. Obviously, in order to generate profit, you’ll add up all possible fixed and variable costs usually generated from hosting a pet.

The most common concerns of private holiday home owners who host animals, can be summarized in odours, dander, fleas, and possible damages.

There would be a solution for all the problems mentioned above, of course, in the event that you were really convinced to proceed in this direction.

Nowadays, businesses engaged in the field of domestic animals offer a wide range of solutions to better manage an animal in the house. The market offers specific products such as air sanitizer, small “hair vacuum”, brushes (especially designed for animal hair), anti-flea products which are also safe and non polluting. Leave each one of them in the house, letting the customer know, upon his/her arrival, where they could be found; make sure you ask him/her to use the products on a daily basis, so as to reduce the awful amount of work that a pet might generate. As far as damages, let’s immediately dispel the common myth that the adult dog digs holes in the garden. This behaviour is a characteristic of puppies which, on the other hand, are rarely taken on trips for obvious practical reasons. As far as the interior, it is your responsibility to remove any delicate object and/or piece of furniture.

Finally, to make your holiday accommodation suitable for this type of market, we recommend you to leave a small basket filled with a new rubber-made bone, a small bag of dry food, and some cheap gadgets that you can easily find in a common pet store. In addition, provide a bowl for food and one for water, a set of plastic bags, and a small shovel for collecting the droppings. Adding a prefabricated low-cost kennel, will make you earn extra points. You can also include it in the photo book therefore making an effective marketing tool out of it, so as to capture the attention of your potential customers, immediately.