reservation system for a pet hotel

Pet care is a business built on responsibility, where clients entrust operators with what matters most to them-a four-legged member of the family. Whether you run a dog hotel, offer multi-day pet sitting or individual dog walking, or operate an animal shelter, without clearly organized bookings and an overview of occupancy, operations can quickly become chaotic. An online booking system is not just a practical tool here-it is the foundation of trust between you and your clients.

What you need to manage ...
  • Capacity occupancy for multi-day stays-how many dogs can be accepted and on which dates.
  • Scheduling individual dog walks with a fixed duration and time for each client.
  • Collecting information about each pet before arrival-vaccinations, diet, health restrictions, and veterinarian contact details.
  • Communication with owners during the stay-check-in confirmation and pickup reminders.
  • Payments for services of different lengths and types-from a one-off walk to a week-long stay.

Running a pet hotel differs from other services in one key respect: every client-and every dog-is different. Stays vary in length, animals have different needs, owners have different requirements, and bookings come through different channels. Manually managing all these variables using a shared calendar, text messages, or spreadsheets only works up to a certain scale. Once you are looking after several animals at the same time, it becomes crucial to have a system that clearly shows what is happening and when, who is paying for what, and who is taking care of each dog. An online booking system also gives clients peace of mind-they can choose a date themselves, provide the necessary information, and keep the entire process under control without having to call or send messages. This saves both parties time and reduces the risk of misunderstandings.

The economics of a dog hotel depend on maximizing capacity utilization and minimizing the administrative burden. Every empty kennel or unoccupied space represents a direct loss of revenue. If you also spend hours each day confirming dates, sending payment details, and manually verifying vaccinations, the operational workload grows in proportion to the number of clients. A system that automatically sends confirmations, collects customer forms, and ensures that bookings and capacity do not overlap frees you to focus on what matters most-caring for the pets themselves. What is more, a customer who can easily book online and receives clear instructions is likely to return and recommend your services to others. In an industry where decisions are often based on personal trust and referrals, this customer experience is a powerful competitive advantage.

Key features for a pet hotel

Running a dog hotel and dog-walking service involves a mix of different types of bookings-from a walk scheduled for a fixed time to a multi-day stay with a flexible arrival date. The features selected below cover this entire range: from flexible booking creation and collecting information about each pet to automated communication with owners and an overview of your team's workload.

Event: Multiple days

Rental businesses, equipment hire, or accommodation – these are typical areas where this event type is a good fit. It allows you to create reservations for whole days or nights, with both the booking process and the price calculation adapted accordingly.

Event: Multiple days

more in the documentation

Offer customers a booking for several consecutive days at once – ideal for rentals and accommodation, which are usually counted in nights or days rather than hours.

This event type lets a customer book one or more consecutive days. In this case, the definition of the events follows on from each other (based on resources), and the system can automatically link such events together. This makes it easy to set, for example, a different price for different days – typically a higher price for weekend accommodation compared to weekdays. Combined with conditional pricing, pricing within this event type can therefore be very flexible.

It's particularly suited to accommodation and space rentals, but you'll also find it useful for all kinds of rental businesses – cars, campervans, e-bikes, or other equipment, where price and availability are calculated at the level of days or nights. By setting a minimum and maximum reservation length, you can easily offer a weekly or weekend rental.

Flexibility of resources and events

Resources and events let you create various combinations of events, services, or places within a single reservation page. Under one roof, you can effectively cover a one-off large event as well as regular hourly bookings.

Flexibility of resources and events

more in the documentation

Run an arbitrarily varied range of services on a single reservation page – one-off events, recurring courses, space rentals, and ticket sales all at the same time? The reenio reservation system can cover even these complex business models.

The reenio reservation system is not limited to just a single type of offering – within one page, you can create any number of resources (places, services, employees) and assign each of them the type of event that best suits that particular offering. This means an hourly court rental via interval events, a monthly yoga course as a full sequence, a one-off seminar as a full single event, and the sale of punch cards or gift coupons, can all run side by side – all on one reservation page and in one administration.

Clarity for such a varied offering is provided by a navigation hub, which can be set up as a multi-step guide, walking the customer through it step by step (e.g. first choosing a service, then an employee or branch).

Last but not least, thanks to collision protection over time, the system also automatically makes sure the same resource (e.g. a specific employee or room) never ends up in two reservations at once, even when it's used across different event and resource types.

Custom booking forms

When the standard details collected from a customer during booking aren't enough, the solution is simple. Booking forms can be extended with custom fields that a customer may or must fill in while booking.

Custom booking forms

more in the documentation

Find out everything you need about customers right at the time of booking – extend the standard form with your own fields and tailor the form to a specific event and type of service.

Custom booking forms let you extend the standard reservation form (name, e-mail, phone) with any additional fields your business needs – from checkboxes, through selecting from options, entering text, all the way to uploading a file (e.g. a photo of the customer or a scanned confirmation). It's also possible to collect specialized data, where the system takes care of validating the correct format.

Individual custom fields can be required, or only shown based on the reserved capacity or a previously selected value. A special group is formed by form fields that affect the reservation price – which makes it easy to handle, for example, a surcharge for renting equipment, a discount for members, or a price adjustment for an above-standard scope of service.

A form can be assigned to a single event, or set globally so it automatically applies to all events on the reservation page. Working with custom forms is therefore very simple while also offering very broad possibilities for use.

Data entered in a custom booking form is saved as part of the specific reservation and can also be included in an export to Excel, and worked with further as needed.

Cash register and payment terminal

When online payments aren't enough and you need to accept payments on the spot, the cash register feature comes in handy – issuing and printing a receipt, processing a card payment through a terminal, and so on.

Cash register and payment terminal

more in the documentation

Handle payments received in person on the spot too – mark a reservation as paid, generate an accounting document, and print it directly on a POS printer, or accept a card payment right away through a connected payment terminal.

The cash register feature lets you mark a reservation as paid directly in the administration, even when the payment took place outside the online payment gateway, for example in cash at reception. The system can then issue a corresponding accounting document for the payment received this way, respecting the configured document numbering, and so on.

For card payments, the system can also be connected to a payment terminal (SumUp, GP Tom, Comgate), which means a payment request can be sent to the terminal directly with a button in the reservation detail, and after a successful payment the system automatically marks the reservation as paid, creates the payment and document, and sends the customer a confirmation by e-mail, just like with payment via the online gateway.

Event: Interval

This event type allows opening hours to be split into regular time slots. Customers book one or more consecutive time slots according to their own needs. One of the most widely used and most efficient event types.

Interval event type

more in the documentation

If you offer services in regular time slots (60 minutes, 90 minutes, etc.), this is the ideal event type, offering a simple and clear booking process.

The Interval event type lets you define a time range within a single day and split it into smaller, regular chunks. On the reservation page, a customer chooses these specific time slots, which can also follow on from one another, extending their reservation according to the defined rules.

This event type is typically suitable for sports facilities and sports complexes, consulting and advisory services, wellness, or a sauna.

Customer database

An overview of your customers, their details, and history is key to any business. The customer database not only records this data but also provides tools for communication, data export, and meeting GDPR requirements.

Customer database

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Keep a clear customer database with a reservation history and a whole range of related tools. The reenio system automatically builds the customer database based on reservations made or direct registration. A registered customer gains the ability to log in and manage their reservations directly within the reservation page. If customer credit is used, they can see their balance within their account and top it up online.

Depending on your settings, a reservation can also be allowed without registration, simply by entering an e-mail address or phone number, which is especially suitable where you don't expect one specific customer to use the reservation system regularly and often.

A well-maintained, extensive customer database is an important marketing tool. The system offers the option of bulk sending e-mail or SMS messages, which is useful for reaching customers with a new offer, a discount campaign, but also operational information or as part of crisis management.

The customer database naturally contains personal data, which today requires a certain approach to how it's handled and protected. The reservation system allows you to set up automatic deletion of personal data after a chosen period, and also keeps track of customer requests to have their data deleted. This makes it easier to meet GDPR requirements in line with the rules defined for your particular business.

If you need to import a customer database from another system or a manually maintained spreadsheet, that's no problem – an existing customer list can be easily and smartly imported into the reenio system.

Online payments

Being able to pay for a reserved service through an online payment gateway is now the standard. Customers today are used to paying quickly and securely in online shops and expect the same comfort when booking or ordering services online.

Online payments

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Let customers pay for their reservation or tickets online right away, before the service is provided – faster, more convenient, and with the certainty that the reservation will be paid, and therefore used.

The reenio system allows you to require prepayment as part of the booking process, so a customer's reservation only becomes valid once paid. You decide yourself whether online payment is mandatory, or whether you leave it up to the customer to pay on site. With mandatory payment, you can set a deadline by which a new reservation must be paid, otherwise it is automatically cancelled and the slot is released for another customer.

For online payments you can choose from several supported payment gateways. The reservation system then handles the technical connection and communication with the chosen gateway, but all business and formal matters are handled directly with the payment gateway provider – you keep the money you receive under your own control, in your own merchant account.

  • GoPay

    An online payment gateway offering a wide range of payment methods, from card payments to fast bank transfers, Apple Pay, or Google Pay.

  • Comgate

    Another Czech payment gateway that also operates in other European countries. Its payment methods vary and cover common needs.

  • Stripe

    A global payment gateway that is becoming increasingly popular. It offers fast integration and approval, so you can start accepting payments within minutes.

  • Bank transfer

    A special type of payment method where the reservation system itself can generate a QR code for payment and then automatically verify and match received payments.

After a successful payment, the system automatically marks the reservation as paid and generates and sends the customer a payment document. The reenio system offers a wide range of options and features for working with payments, including exports, refunds, and more. However, it should be noted that reenio itself is not an accounting system.

Reservation approval

The standard model assumes that as soon as a reservation is created, it's fully valid. The reservation approval feature brings the option where a customer is clearly informed that they must wait for their reservation to be approved.

Reservation approval

more in the documentation

Don't let customers create reservations online without your say – decide for yourself which reservation to approve. This is useful anywhere a booking request needs to be reviewed first, before you actually assign the customer an event.

The reservation approval feature changes the standard process so that a reservation created by a customer isn't approved right away, but first waits for your approval in the administration. After creating a reservation, the customer is informed that their reservation is awaiting approval, and receives final confirmation (and, if applicable, a prompt for online payment) only once you approve, or alternatively reject, the reservation.

This is useful anywhere you want full control over how events are filled – for example for individual consultations, where you first need to check whether a time slot is suitable, for services that require related preparations to be arranged, or anywhere you want to prevent random or unsuitable reservations.

Custom messages

Automating communication with customers based on specific requirements and events brings a powerful tool that supports and improves how well informed your customers are, simplifies processes, and also improves your marketing work and how you gather feedback.

Custom messages

more in the documentation

Automate communication with customers exactly to your needs – from reminders, through satisfaction surveys, to marketing offers, in the form of e-mails or SMS messages. The possibilities of custom messages are, however, far broader. Custom messages can also be used to notify an external system or device, or to inform administrators or employees.

Custom messages allow you to set up sending of messages tied to a specific event in the reservation process and a corresponding moment in time. The event can be automatic (creation of a reservation, end of an event, etc.) or tied to a manual change of a reservation's status in the administration or mobile app.

  • E-mail

    The basic type of custom message, where a text e-mail message with your own content is sent.

  • SMS

    A popular message type which, although limited in size and format, offers greater delivery certainty.

  • Webhook

    A technical solution for notifying an external system that some event has occurred. Typically used for various automations.

  • Mobile app

    A quick way to send a notification directly into a specific reenio mobile app.

  • Smartemailing

    If simple text content for an e-mail isn't enough, you can use templates and sending via the Smartemailing tool.

Unlike system notifications, which have a fixed structure and content, with custom messages you decide the content and purpose yourself – typically these are used for a thank-you or a request for feedback after an event ends, a reminder before an upcoming event, a marketing offer, booking instructions, birthday or name-day wishes (even with a gift coupon), or a reminder to a customer who hasn't booked for a while.

The content of custom messages can also contain so-called placeholder variables, which are replaced with the corresponding value when the message is actually sent, e.g. the customer's name or the reservation's start time. Custom messages are assigned to events via message groups, so there's no need to set up rules for every event separately, while still keeping flexibility for different situations and needs.

A special feature of certain message types and specific events is the ability to add dynamic elements to a custom message – a satisfaction survey or a generated coupon code. It's entirely up to you how you integrate these options into your marketing activities.

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Are you wondering if an online reservation system is right for you? Check out the FREQUENT QUESTIONS or the DOCUMENTATION pages and try out the reenio system.