Setting and Enforcing Your Pet Sitting or Dog Walking Cancellation Policy

Every professional pet care business should have an easy-to-understand cancellation policy.

Life can be unpredictable. No matter how well we plan out our vacations ahead of time, no one will ever be able to account for a sudden storm that delays your flight out, and no matter how much we want to go to a concert that Saturday night and leave our pup in the hands of their favorite pet sitter, sometimes we get sick and have to take a rain check. Within the pet care industry, client schedules are constantly changing, and it’s up to you to adapt and roll with the punches as best you can. Especially when clients can cancel lucrative overnight pet sittings or their pet’s daily dog walk at the drop of a hat.

While neither you nor your clients can prepare yourselves for every cancellation and loss of potential income that might come your way, there are things you can do to help minimize last-minute cancellations and ensure that your company still turns a profit and your staff members still earn a living. One of the biggest things you can do is ensure that you have a fair but firm cancellation policy and that your clients are clear on your company’s expectations surrounding cancelled services.

In this post, we’ll discuss what steps you can take to create a solid cancellation policy, how you can effectively share those policies with your clients, and why enforcing such policies is essential.

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Why Every Pet Sitter Needs A Cancellation Policy

Whether you’re a solo pet sitter or the owner of a pet care business that employs several staff members, your and your team’s time is valuable, and it is vital to recognize that along with the fact that there is a limit to the number of visits you can schedule within a day. Especially during peak busy times such as the winter holidays or the summer months, there may be occasions when you have a fully booked calendar and have to turn away prospective clients. It never feels good to turn down potential business, but you must also ensure you and your sitters aren’t stretched too thin.

However, this careful consideration and management of your time can feel harrowing when a client cancels their services at the last minute, leaving you no opportunity to fill their vacancy with another client’s request. In such a situation, you might grapple with whether or not to charge the client a fee for the cancellation, especially if they do so due to an emergency. Though it may not feel great to charge a client in such a situation, it’s important to remember that not charging for the cancellation means a loss of revenue for your business. It can also mean a loss in vital income for your staff members, who count on the visits assigned to them to pay their bills.

While there may be some instances where you waive a cancellation fee or where your cancellation policies are set up in a tiered way that spares clients a fee if they cancel services a certain amount of time in advance, you should at least consider charging a cancellation fee for same-day cancellations. This can help to better protect your company’s profits and the livelihoods of your team members. Having a policy where you charge for cancellations can discourage them altogether and help ensure that you’re reserving space on your and your team’s schedule for clients who actually intend to use your services.

What your cancellation policy entails is entirely up to you. If you would like to have a more lenient cancellation policy that allows your clients a greater amount of flexibility with their schedules, go for it! Just remember to have some sort of fee or consequence in place for last-minute cancellations that your clients are aware of so that you don’t leave yourself or your business open to being taken advantage of by having no policy at all. While it’s highly unlikely that every one of your clients would cancel services repeatedly or for frivolous reasons, it’s better to tread with caution than to wind up with regrets later on.

Take some time to figure out what you would consider to be unreasonable for cancellations in terms of the number of cancellations being made, their frequency, and the amount of notice you’re given from a client. Once you have made some decisions on what you consider to be understandable in terms of cancellations and what you don’t, put together an official cancellation policy for your business and include it in your company’s pet-sitting contract and service agreements. This way, it will be easy for your clients to understand your cancellation policy before signing their agreement to your terms. To that end, we always recommend having clients read and sign these agreements before you or anyone else from your company provides services to their pets.

Deciding On A Fair Cancellation Policy

When you consider the parameters of your cancellation policy, it needs to be fair not only to your clients but also to you and your staff members. Each pet care company has different needs and goals for its services and clientele, so a cancellation policy that works for one business might not be what’s best for yours. Here are some things to think about

Every pet sitting company has different needs, goals, and clients, so what works for cancellations for one business might differ from what's best for you. Here are some things to think about when deciding on the cancellation policy that’s right for you:

How far in advance do your clients typically book? If your clients usually book weeks or months in advance, you're unlikely to be able to fill an open slot on your schedule when a client cancels with only a few days' notice.

How far in advance are you typically fully booked? If you're often finding yourself fully booked and turning clients away, you can't afford to hold spaces on your schedule for clients who may cancel at the last minute after it's too late to fill that spot with another client.

How much notice do you feel you and your staff deserve? Even if you're not fully booked and turning away clients, when you have set aside time to serve clients, it's reasonable to expect to still be paid for your time when those same services are cancelled on short notice.

What type of clients do you want to provide services for? If you don't want clients who don't respect your time and frequently cancel on short notice, one of the easiest ways to deter them is to have and enforce a cancellation policy. Any client who truly values you is unlikely to have any issues with a reasonable cancellation policy; in fact, these types of clients would probably insist on paying you even if you didn't have a cancellation policy in place.

How many cancellations are too many? It's simplest to have a cancellation policy that you enforce every time a client cancels on short notice. Still, some pet sitters prefer to only charge for cancellations if a particular client cancels too often. If you decide to do this, ensure your cancellation policy clearly defines how many free cancellations you allow so clients know what to expect.

How much will you charge for cancellations? Depending on what you would like to do, you may choose to charge your clients for the total price of their service when they cancel, but you can also charge them a certain percentage of the service’s cost or set a flat fee that you charge on all cancellations. Again, think about what’s fair to both you and your clients before you settle on what your cancellation fees should be.

Should your cancellation policy be the same for all services and all times of the year? It sometimes makes sense to have different cancellation policies for different scenarios. If you typically experience higher demand for you services around major holidays, for example, you could require more notice regarding cancellations or charge a higher fee if someone cancels their holiday services. You may even want to have a stricter cancellation policy for services like overnights since each sitter can only do one overnight stay per day, and it can be hard to refill those services once they’ve been called off.

Some companies also have different cancellation policies for daily dog walking services and vacation visits, allowing for more flexibility or granting discounted rates for clients who receive consistent services instead of being less flexible with clients receiving drop-in services. While you may allow clients with a consistent schedule to receive no penalty for some cancellations, you may even choose to be just as strict with their cancellations if you price their services at a discounted rate in exchange for their consistency. There’s no right or wrong answer in the end, but carefully consider different cancellation scenarios and decide what you feel is the right way to handle them.

Not sure what you want to charge for holiday services, let alone their cancellation rates? To help you set holiday fees for your business, we’ve created a free Holiday Fee Calculator Tool that provides the national averages for flat rate and percentage-based fees for the most common U.S. holidays. We also have a detailed Guide To Setting Holiday Fees For Pet Sitters And Dog Walkers you should check out for more information.

Making Clients Aware Of Your Cancellation Policy

Once you have settled on a cancellation policy for your company, you must communicate it to your clients and ensure it is posted somewhere where they can easily reference it.

The most important place to put the details on your cancellation policy and any relevant fees is within your company’s client contract so that you have it in writing that your clients have agreed to it and your other terms. Time To Pet allows you to create custom Client Agreements for your business and keeps a record of each client’s signature so you can easily pull it up from reference later.

While this is a fantastic place to put your cancellation policies, it shouldn’t be the only place. Clients don’t always thoroughly read contracts and may not remember them later. That’s why, in order to avoid any potential confusion or misunderstandings over your cancellation policies down the line, you should include your cancellation policy in the following locations:

Meet & Greets – As part of your meet and greet with clients, it’s never a bad idea to review your cancellation policy and any other policies for your company that you want to be sure your clients are aware of. That way, they can ask any questions they might have, and you can ensure they fully understand what is expected of them as your company's clients.

Confirmation Emails – Include a note about your cancellation policy when you first confirm bookings with clients and when you send them any reminders about upcoming services. If sending these confirmations through email, consider making the cancellation policy part of your email signature so that it’s at the bottom of each email your clients receive from your company. In Time To Pet, you can customize the default language used in your company’s confirmation messages to include this. You can do so from the Messaging section of your company’s settings.

Your Website – Aside from your company’s client contract, your website is the most important place to display your cancellation policy and fees. It is easily accessed by existing and prospective clients alike and can referenced as many times as needed. When building your website, consider having a “Policies” page where you list every single one of your company’s policies, including your cancellation policy, or add your cancellation policy to your “Services” page. There are multiple places on your site where it might make sense to include your cancellation policy, and if you want to include it in more than one place to ensure clients see it, go for it!

Enforcing Your Cancellation Policy

The easiest way to enforce your cancellation policy is to require payment for services in advance. That way, whenever a client cancels, you can simply deduct the cancellation fee from what the client has already paid. You can then decide whether you would like to give the client credit or refund any remaining amount instead of asking them to pay a cancellation fee that they may never follow up on if they only booked you for one set of services.

Another critical thing to remember when enforcing your cancellation policy is to stick to the terms you have laid out and that your clients have agreed to. While there will always be extenuating circumstances that will urge you to waive these fees for certain clients or situations, those should be the exception, not the rule. It may be hard sometimes to insist on charging a cancellation fee, and some clients may view it as unfair or refuse to comply with your terms, but those clients are generally in the minority. So long as your policies are fair and clearly laid out, most clients won’t mind paying what you and your team are due.

Never let your fear of losing clients prevent you from doing what is right for you and your business, and remember that if a client has a problem with a reasonable policy and takes their business elsewhere, they probably aren’t the kind of client you really want for your company in the long run.