How to Use Petswelcome’s Pet-Friendly Trip Planner

One of Petswelcome’s most popular features is our Pet-friendly Trip Planner, which pet-owners use to plan their road trips with their favorite animal(s). The best feature of the Trip Planner, besides allowing you to find pet-friendly hotels along your route, is that you can save it. Overall, the planner is much more than simply getting directions to your destination while you’re in the car, it’s a complete saved itinerary of your trip–including route, driving directions, stopovers and hotels you’ve picked along the way–one that you can refer to before you leave to make any last-minute changes to your itinerary if need be, while also accessing it on the road to get to all your intended stops.

Because of its popularity, we thought we’d write a quick how-to-use piece on it to spread the word so that you can use it for your next trip with no learning curve involved at all. We’re sure you’ll enjoy its ease of use and convenience in organizing your itinerary and allowing you to concentrate on the fun, rather than the hassles, of traveling on the road with a pet (and it is VERY fun….)

The first thing to do is to go to our Trip Planner page and input your departure point, any stop-overs you’re thinking of making, and your destination city. For this example trip, we’re Departing from New York, NY, stopping over in Washington, DC, with a final destination of Savannah, GA. Once you input that information and click on Go!, you get your initial list of hotels along your route, including hotels in your stopover, Washington, DC. If you want to change the route to another road, all you need to do is drag the route on the map and the hotels results will change.

Once you have the desired route, you can focus on the hotels along the way in the left sidebar. You can click on “More Info” for each hotel to get more details about the hotel (which will appear over the map) and/or you can check the “Add to Your Trip” box which will ensure that that hotel will be included in your driving directions.

If for some reason you decide to change  your destination or stopover,  you can change it in the top bar which shows your previous stopover/destination choices. Once you’ve made your final decisions and have chosen hotels to add to your trip, you can scroll down to the bottom of the hotel results column and you’ll see a button that says, “Get Directions with Selected Hotels.”

After you click on Get Directions with Selected Hotels, you will then get driving directions with the hotels you have selected included in the directions. At the top of the directions column, you’ll see that you have three choices: Save, Share, or Print. If you save the route, it will be saved in your Petswelcome Passport account. If you don’t have a Passport account, you can choose the option to create one. There is no charge whatsoever and it will give you easy access to your itinerary any time before you leave (in case you want to make changes) and while you’re on the road. You can also share your route by emailing to a friend who or relative who might be going on the same trip but in a separate car, or on a later date. Or you can save it the old-fashioned way by printing.

And that, in a nutshell, is how you can use Petswelcome’s Pet-Friendly Trip Planner to give you the ability to plan the perfect road trip with your favorite animals. We say, Yay to that. Please let us know any additional features you would like to see and we’ll get on it asap. In the meantime, Happy Pet Travels!

To read about other considerations when heading out on the road with your pet, see our article Planning a Pet-Friendly Road Trip.