What a boarding booking has to carry
A restaurant books a table. A kennel books a dog into a physical space for a run of nights, and everything hangs off that. The system has to know how many spaces you have on each date and stop selling the eleventh when you have ten. It has to know that two dogs from one household share a room. It has to hold vaccination records with expiry dates and refuse a stay that ends after the booster runs out. It has to know that this dog has never been assessed. It has to price a bank holiday differently from a Tuesday in February, take a deposit for Christmas, and remember that the owner bought a ten-day daycare pass in March with four days left on it.
A calendar plugin does none of that. Below are the platforms built for it, judged on what a website needs from them.
Gingr
For: daycare and boarding facilities, often with grooming and training attached.
Website side: a branded customer portal plus embeddable booking and request widgets, so the Book button on your site can open a reservation request rather than a contact form.
Facility features: reservations by service with capacity limits, daycare packages and memberships, vaccination tracking with expiry dates, temperament and behaviour flags on the animal record, owner accounts, report cards with photos, point of sale, and integrations for webcams and payments.
Strengths: the broadest option when you run several services under one roof, and the owner-facing app and report cards do real reassurance work. Watch: it is a facility system with a facility price and a facility setup. A home boarder with four dogs will find it heavy.
PetExec
For: daycare, boarding, grooming and training in one building.
Website side: an owner portal and appointment request links you can point the site at.
Facility features: boarding and daycare scheduling, package tracking so prepaid days count down, vaccination records with expiry, report cards, staff scheduling, and requests that you approve rather than bookings that land unseen.
Strengths: the approval step suits kennels that will not take a new dog without an assessment, and package tracking is solid. Watch: the interface is functional rather than fashionable, which matters more to your staff than to your owners.
Revelation Pets
For: UK, Irish and European kennels, catteries and daycares, and the smaller end of the market generally.
Website side: an online booking page and embeddable booking, with the enquiry landing in the calendar rather than an inbox.
Facility features: an occupancy calendar, room and pen types, pricing rules including peak dates and part-day charges, vaccination reminders, customer accounts, deposits and card payments.
Strengths: written for how British and European boarding actually works, including peak pricing and the way most kennels handle deposits. Quick to set up. Watch: a smaller ecosystem than the US platforms if you want deep third-party integrations.
Kennel Connection
For: long-established kennels and catteries, often larger ones.
Website side: an online booking and customer portal component that sits alongside the main system.
Facility features: boarding, daycare, grooming and training scheduling, capacity management, vaccination tracking, packages and reporting.
Strengths: decades of boarding-specific logic and a lot of kennels running it happily. Watch: deployment options have changed over the years, so confirm with the vendor exactly how the current online booking component embeds before you design around it.
What your website needs from any of them
- A Book button in the header on every page, one tap, with daycare and boarding as separate obvious routes.
- An assessment as its own bookable item, so a new dog is not asked to book a stay first.
- Real availability, or an honest request. Either the calendar shows what is free, or the button says "request a stay" and you reply the same day. What loses bookings is a form that pretends to be a calendar.
- Vaccination upload and consent inside the platform flow, never by email attachment.
- Peak dates, minimum stays and second-dog rates stated on the site in the same words the software will charge.
- A deposit or card on file for peak stays, with the cancellation policy written on the booking page.
- Package balances visible to the owner in their account, so nobody rings to ask how many days are left.
- Vaccination expiry reminders where the platform supports them, which saves the argument at the door in August.
- Tracking of booking clicks and call taps by page, so you know whether the boarding page or the daycare page fills the diary.
Choosing
- Multi-service facility, US, Canada or Australia: Gingr or PetExec.
- UK or Irish kennel, cattery or daycare: Revelation Pets, or Gingr if you also groom.
- Large established kennel already running desktop software: Kennel Connection, with the online component confirmed.
- Home boarder with a handful of dogs: start with Revelation Pets and keep the setup light.
Already on something that works? Stay on it. The website's job is to get an anxious owner into whichever platform you run, in one tap, with the requirements already read.
Where this sits
Embedding the platform you run, separating the daycare and boarding routes, and putting the assessment, the vaccinations and the consent in front of the first stay rather than behind it is the core of a dog daycare and boarding website, and the same pattern runs through the other pet business sites we build. The software holds the dog's record. The site gets the owner into it before they ring the kennel down the lane.