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Laura Zhou

When 27-year-old Dong Liang walked his pet bulldog across the lobby of a hotel in Beijing for his long-anticipated "staycation", he felt grateful.
"I can finally travel with my dog," the office worker for a film investment company in Beijing said. "He is my family. Travelling with family is such a pleasure."
In the room of about 30 square metres, Liang found a cushion, bowl and two knot-rope bones in the corner near his bed.
The room had a sign on the door to remind other guests of the furry visitor, and cleaners to ensure there were no unwelcome reminders of the room's previous inhabitants.
The Aloft Beijing Haidian, run by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, where Liang spent his days, is one of the few pet-friendly hotels in the capital city.
The mainland has about 300 hotels that accept guests travelling with pets, according to the travel website Qunar. As the country's middle class has grown, so too has pet ownership and a general awareness of animal welfare. Private car ownership has also soared, creating a huge rise in family leisure travel, which increasingly includes Fido coming along for the ride.
Qunar expects that about 30,000 hotels will become pet-friendly in the coming years.
The Aloft has been pet friendly since it opened near Beijing's west fourth ring road in late 2008: guests are welcome to bring their dogs, and dog beds, bowls and even dog carriers are provided in rooms.
Rex Yuan, one of the hotel's receptionists, said the number of inquiries about pet services had grown steadily in recent years.
Yuan couldn't remember how many canine guests had stayed at the hotel to date, but said most owners brought them along for company or were bringing sick pets to the city for treatment at the local pet hospital.
Still, travelling with a pet is far from easy on the mainland. Blind passengers have only recently been allowed to take guide dogs on public transport, and find it almost impossible to book accommodation for them.
Although the capital had nearly a million officially registered dogs in late 2012, according to the Beijing Public Security Bureau, most hotels in the capital do not allow pets - to the chagrin of owners.
Beijing resident Huang Nan is one of those disappointed owners. With a passion for travel, Huang and her husband loved jumping in the car and heading into the countryside until they found a homeless dog on a street near their home about 10 years ago.
"We don't want to bother family or friends to take care of the dog, so we decided that one of us should stay at home if the other wanted to travel out of town," Huang said. "We never take long trips, just like you would never leave your children alone at home."
Most hotels still cite safety and sanitation as their main reasons for refusing pets, despite the sharp rise in pet ownership in the past decade.
Figures from Beijing Public Security Bureau show that by late 2012, more than 950,000 dogs had been registered, 10 times as many as in 1994, although the number of pet dogs in Beijing is believed to be about two million.
Dogs are such popular pets, especially in developed cities, that market intelligence firm Euromonitor International predicts dog food sales on the mainland to triple to more than US$760 million by 2019.
Even those facilities that do accept pets can be less than ideal. Huang said she was told at a "pet friendly" hotel in a town near the Great Wall in suburban Beijing that dogs must be kept in another room. She refused, and left immediately. "They don't understand, dogs are like our children," Huang said. "There's no reason to travel with your kids but stay in different rooms."
Qunar launched a campaign earlier this year, calling for more hotels on the mainland to accept animal guests.
As a part of the campaign, the website proposed a standard for pet-friendly hotels, in which customers and their pets would be given special rooms which had at least a dog's bed, a bowl and a sign on a door to alert other guests.
When booking rooms, guests would need to provide documents to show their pet was officially registered and vaccinated. They would also have to keep their dog on a leash in public.
Customers should never leave dogs alone in the room, the proposal said, and customers would pay for damage to the rooms.
Huang said that finding a pet-friendly hotel had become her top priority while travelling.
"I won't hesitate to go if the hotel accepts our dog," she said. "Even if I need to pay more, I don't mind because it makes me feel better and my dog deserves the service."
 


Why can't Chinese hotels let sleeping dogs lie? Demand grows for pet-friendly hotels

Mainland China has about 300 hotels that accept guests travelling with a pet. File Photo

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