Top Dogs: Find the Best Kennels in the Chicago Area

As you plan your holiday season travel, you can visit many websites to compare airfares, study traffic patterns, or monitor the weather and delays. But when it comes to where your pet will be spending your vacation, chances are good you’re flying blind.

You have several choices: Take your pet along. Ask a friend to host your critter or to house sit. Hire a pet sitter. Or book a stay at a kennel. If you go with the kennel option, nonprofit consumer group Chicago Consumers’ Checkbook has identified several places that will do just fine by Fido, along with detailed advice on how to evaluate kennels and how to eliminate common pet peeves. Checkbook surveyed its members, Consumer Reports subscribers, and other local consumers about their experiences with area boarding spots. (It’s still working on methods to survey pets.) For the next month, Checkbook is offering free access to its ratings of kennels to Patch readers via this link: Checkbook.org/PatchCHI/Kennels.

If you decide a kennel is the best option, get recommendations from other pet owners, which Checkbook did on a very wide scale. Several of the kennels rated by consumers in its surveys received “superior” ratings overall from almost all of their surveyed customers. But some kennels didn’t exactly wow clients with stellar service.

Checkbook also found big price differences among local kennels. To board a 35-pound springer spaniel for one week, for example, its undercover shoppers were quoted prices ranging from $147 to more than $450. That’s just for the basic boarding. At some kennels, the extras can add up fast: Additional exercise can cost an extra $10 or more per day; administering a pill might cost $3 or more per day. Also, some kennels’ extremely limited drop-off and pickup periods make it difficult to avoid paying for an extra day.

It can all add up to a substantial chunk of your vacation budget. Fortunately, some of the higher- rated kennels charge below-average prices.

Carefully check out any kennel you are considering:

• Be wary of a kennel that won’t let you inspect its facilities unannounced during regular operating hours. Some kennels insist that letting strangers walk through the entire facility needlessly agitates the dogs, but Checkbook argues that’s a price worth paying for the benefits of openness. A second-best solution is for the kennel to allow visitors to view boarding areas from behind glass.
• Check whether dogs have their own indoor and outdoor runs—large enough and with protection from sun, rain, cold, and heat.
• Make sure animals are protected from one another and that there is proper fencing to keep your pet in and other animals out.
• If you are boarding a cat, does the facility have a separate space for it? Dog kennels can be extremely noisy, and may traumatize a cat unaccustomed to the constant barking.
• Inspect for proper health protections—notice whether the facility is clean and not excessively smelly, that there’s adequate ventilation and indoor spaces are kept at a reasonable temperature, that all admitted pets must have proof of proper vaccinations, that pets are carefully examined for signs of disease or parasites at check-in, and that there’s an isolation room for sick animals.
• Size up staff members. Do they answer your questions? Do they show affection for the animals? Are they available 24 hours per day?
• Determine when the kennel is open for drop-off and pickup. A common complaint is that facilities don’t have convenient hours for drop-off or pick-up, particularly on weekends.
• Ask about arrangements for veterinary care, in case your pet gets sick. If you have a regular veterinarian, check whether the kennel will use him or her. (Expect to pay for transportation and vet fees.) If your pet takes regular medications, will the kennel administer shots or pills?
• Can you check in on your pet while away? Many kennels now have webcams that let customers monitor their pets.

Another option is to hire a pet-sitting service to come to your home two or three times per day to care for your critters. Pet sitters’ daily fees are usually more expensive than stays for a single pet at a kennel—pet sitters generally charge between $50 and $75 per day for one pet. But most services offer discounts for additional pets, and some charge by the visit, regardless of the number of pets they care for. So, if you have more than one pet, a pet-sitting service might cost less than a kennel.

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Chicago Consumers’ Checkbook magazine and Checkbook.org is a nonprofit organization with a mission to help consumers get the best service and lowest prices. It is supported by consumers and takes no money from the service providers it evaluates. You can access all of Checkbook’s ratings of area kennels free of charge until Jan. 5 at Checkbook.org/PatchCHI/Kennels.