Should You Allow Pets in Your Vacation Home?

Okay, so let's talk about pets.

One thing you'll hear all the time in business is that you need to define your ideal customer, or in our case, our guest avatar.

That essentially means who is the person that is coming to stay and pay to rent your vacation home? Personally, I think a lot of times people overcomplicate this.

When you're buying your very first vacation home, your ideal guest is usually you.

For us, when we bought Trout Landing, we were two parents with a one-year-old baby and a 10-year-old dog.

That influenced the way we designed the house because we wanted it to be a place that worked for us.

A revolutionary concept, I know.

Of course, we made the house pet-friendly.

We weren't trying to attract dog owners.

We were dog owners.

Every time we visited the house, our dog, Jack, was coming with us.

So when we designed the space, we naturally designed it around the way our own family traveled.

We weren't sitting around saying, "You know what demographic we really need to capture?" We were simply setting up a house to fit our own family.

We also knew what kind of guests we were.

We respected other people's homes.

We cleaned up after our dog.

We didn't let him chew furniture or jump all over the beds.

Okay, maybe a little bit on the beds.

And maybe this sounds naive, but I remember thinking, "If we're capable of taking care of someone else's home while traveling with our dog, I'm sure other people are, too." That mindset has actually become one of the biggest lessons I've learned as a host.

Assume good intent.

If I assumed every guest was going to ruin my house, hosting was gonna be miserable.

Don't let one bad apple sour your taste for the rest of the bunch.

Now, that doesn't mean ignoring red flags.

It simply means believing that the overwhelming majority of people are good people, are people who want to treat someone else's home with the same respect they'd want shown to theirs, and to start from a place of trust rather than a place of suspicion.