What a cattery booking has to carry
A cattery booking is not an appointment. It is a stay, and it has to hold more than a date and a name.
It has to hold a pen, because a family pen for three cats from one home is a different unit of capacity from a standard single. It has to hold two dates and know that the last night is not the collection day. It has to know your arrival and collection windows, because cats do not turn up at nine at night. It has to carry a vaccination record with an expiry date on it, medication with a dose and a time, feeding notes, vet details, and an emergency contact who is not away in Portugal with the owner.
Then it has to hold peak. August and Christmas are the weeks that pay for the year, and the software either shows those as gone or it does not.
Judge the four tools below on that, not on the marketing page.
Revelation Pets
Cloud software built for kennels and catteries, and the one most commonly found in smaller UK catteries. It handles boarding runs by unit, vaccination records with expiry, feeding and medication notes, and an owner-facing booking request with a customer portal. The scale suits a cattery with a handful to a few dozen pens rather than a large multi-service site.
The thing to confirm before you commit is how the online request behaves at peak: whether an owner can request dates that are already full, and whether requests land as pending until you approve them. Ask the vendor to show you that flow with your own pen types loaded.
Gingr
Strong on capacity, and the most configurable of the four. Lodging types, availability rules and reservation approval are its core, along with owner accounts, vaccination tracking with reminders, deposits and card handling, and a wide integration list.
It is built around larger boarding and daycare operations, so a small cattery pays for depth it may not use, and the setup is a project rather than an afternoon. If you run cats and dogs on one site, or you have enough pens that overbooking August would genuinely hurt, that depth is the reason to pick it.
PetExec
Boarding, daycare and grooming in one system, with owner portals, vaccination records, packages and reporting. It is a good fit when the cattery is one part of a business that also boards dogs or grooms, because the owner has one login and you have one diary.
If cats are all you do, you are buying modules you will never open. Check how it presents unit types to the owner during booking, and whether the confirmation email can carry your requirements text.
Kennel Connection
The long-established name, with a modern cloud version alongside the older installed product. Deep on the operational side: unit management, runs, feeding and medication schedules, reports and invoicing, with an online reservation portal for owners.
It rewards a cattery that already runs tight processes and wants the software to match them. Confirm which product you are being quoted, cloud or installed, because the two behave very differently for online booking, and ask what the portal looks like on a phone.
What your website needs from any of them
Whichever you choose, the cattery website has to do four things with it.
Embed, do not exile. The booking step belongs on your own page with your own navigation around it. A raw link to a portal on someone else's domain loses people, and it loses the ability to measure anything.
Deep-link the pen type. An owner reading the family pen page should arrive at booking with the family pen already selected. One tap fewer is a real difference at eleven at night.
Load it lazily. A booking widget that ships a large script on the home page costs you the speed you paid for. Load it on interaction or on the booking page only.
Track the tap. Booking clicks and call taps by page, so you can tell whether the pen photography page or the prices page is producing the stays.
Requirements in two places
Whatever the software collects, the requirements belong on the site as content too: the vaccination course and the timing before arrival, flea and worm treatment, and what to bring. The site states them so an owner can check before booking, the software confirms and stores them at the point of booking, and the expiry reminder goes out before next August. Requirements that live only inside the booking flow get read once and forgotten, and then somebody arrives at the gate with a card that ran out in March.
Choosing
Cats only, under about thirty pens, and you want it running this month: Revelation Pets. Large capacity, tight peak-season control or cats and dogs together: Gingr. Boarding plus daycare or grooming in one business: PetExec. An established operation with strong internal process: Kennel Connection.
None of them is a website. All four are a diary with a door, and the door works better when it opens from a page that has already shown the owner the pen.
Where this sits
We embed Revelation Pets, Gingr, PetExec and Kennel Connection into cattery websites, deep-linked by pen type and tested on a phone, and the same approach runs through our other pet business websites. What is included is on pricing. Pick the software for how you run the pens, then make the website open the door to it.