The pet-friendly concept as a way to increase consumer loyalty in the hospitality industry

Abstract

The article is devoted to pet-friendly concepts, one of the most relevant of the hotel business, because the number of pet owners is currently growing steadily and more and more hospitality industry enterprises adopt it. Since tourism is currently experiencing an active growth in consumer interest, the problem of traveling with a pet is quite relevant for many tourists, as evidenced by a steady increase in the number of requests on the Internet for this type of travel. Often, the pet owner should choose to leave the animal to relatives, overexposure or pet hotel, which requires careful selection of a reliable company, or take pet to trip. But limited number of pet-friendly hotels in the destination makes trip with pet impossible. The article describes the cases of the most successful foreign and domestic practice of applying various service technologies aimed at providing not just accommodation for a guest with an pets, but at creating maximum comfort for owners with an additional set of services for pet. This technological approach positively effects on the consumer’s loyalty and allows hotel enterprises to form their own permanent segment of guests. Among the problems of implying pat-friendly concept we can note the most important: insufficient number of hotel and restaurant businesses, especially in certain regions of the Russian Federation, the imperfection of the legislative framework, which is currently a significant constraint in our country in the development of customer-oriented service technologies at hospitality industry enterprises.