I dropped my dogs off on Friday evening, along with a tote bag of their food bowls, pre-portioned…read moreand labeled bags of food, and two blankets. The woman at the front desk was very friendly and made me feel at ease. The facility smelled as good as boarding facility can, and seemed clean. She took down my food instructions (since I had brought my own food and requested that they were fed what I brought), and she wrote a description of my blankets. She told me that they wash the blankets, so the description would help them go back to the correct dog when they come out of the dryer. She asked if my dogs had any allergies, etc. Sounds awesome, right?
I returned to pick up my dogs on Tuesday mid-morning.
I was charged appropriately, $18 per dog, per day, plus tax.
Here's where I ran into problems...when the blankets were handed back to me, they were so dirty that I had to put them in a trash bag just to get them into my car. There is no way they had been washed. As a result of not having blankets clean enough to lay on my car seats, I now need my car's interior cleaned from the dirt on my dogs paws. I guess that's my lesson in not bringing extra blankets. I won't make that mistake again.
I didn't even bring that to the staff's attention, because I had a bigger issue.
I had sent my own food for a reason. My dachshund has thyroid issues that make her overweight. She is on a calorie-counted diet. When I opened the bag I sent with them, only ONE portion of food for each dog was missing. So I thought either my dogs didn't get fed for 4 of the 5 days, or they fed them something else. I immediately called and asked what had happened, and received a return call a short time later from the owner. He said that the person in charge of my dogs for the weekend had difficulty getting them to eat their food the first night. So they looked at their info card, saw no allergies, and took it upon themselves to feed my dogs the kennel's food.
The owner said that they have a procedure for this, if a dog won't eat, the staff member is to call the owner for advice, and then call the customer and ASK PERMISSION to feed the dogs something else. No one called me for permission. No one called me at all. The owner said that this will prompt a staff meeting about policy.
That's fine and dandy, but does nothing for my frustration at paying almost $200 for my instructions to be ignored completely.
The owner seemed sincere in his apology, and I would give this place ONE MORE CHANCE, based pretty much only on convenience of location. If they failed again, though, there is no way for a third try.
