How we score pet-friendliness
The full methodology behind every hotel review — how the paw rating works, what we use as evidence, what we deliberately don't do, and how often the data refreshes.
Pet-friendly hotel listings are abundant on the internet. Few of them are useful. Most copy a hotel's own marketing copy verbatim, accept any property's self-claim as evidence, and present a star rating as if it told you anything about the experience of bringing a dog. This page sets out how we do it differently.
Every figure on a Four Legged Guests hotel page is derived from a documented process. If you find something you can't reconcile against this methodology, that's a bug — please tell us.
The paw rating, explained
The paw rating is a 0–5 score that reflects only the experience of guests who travelled with a pet. It is independent of the hotel's overall star rating and independent of the hotel's headline Agoda guest score. A 5-star city hotel can carry a 3-paw rating if pet-owning guests reported a frosty welcome; a quirky village B&B can carry 5 paws if the dogs there have a great time.
To earn a paw rating, a hotel must clear three gates:
Marked pet-friendly at source
Agoda's own pet-friendly filter must include the property. We re-check this against the live Agoda inventory at least quarterly.
Real guest reviews mentioning a pet
We scrape recent guest reviews and pre-filter them with a regex covering dogs, pets, paws, puppies, and adjacent vocabulary. Properties with no pet-mention review history do not appear on the site at all.
LLM-verified relevance
Every pre-filtered review is then passed through an LLM judge that confirms whether the reviewer is genuinely describing a pet-related experience (versus a passing mention) and isolates what they actually said about the welcome, fees, restrictions, and walking access.
The paw rating itself is the mean star rating of the verified pet-mention reviews, rounded to one decimal place. The number alongside the rating (e.g. 4.5 / 5 · 12 pet reviews) is the count of reviews that contributed to it — that's the only sample size on the page, and the only signal of how much weight you should put on it. A 5-paw rating from one review is a hint; a 4.6-paw rating from forty is a pattern.
What's actually on each hotel page
Every hotel page draws from the same three layers:
- Facts about the property — address, room count, year opened, accommodation type, photos. Sourced from the Agoda affiliate inventory. Refreshed when Agoda updates the master record.
- The paw rating and its evidence — described above. The summary text and pet themes (e.g. "Warm welcome for dogs") are paraphrased motifs grounded in the verified reviews. We never publish verbatim review text, name reviewers, or quote them.
- The booking link — a fresh affiliate URL minted at publish time so the price and availability you see at Agoda when you click through are current. We earn a commission when you book; you pay the same price either way. Full details on our affiliate disclosure page.
What we don't do
We don't accept payment for placement
Rankings within each destination are driven by the paw rating only. No hotel can pay to appear, to outrank another property, or to influence the rating. If a hotel approaches us about "promoted listings" or sponsored coverage, we decline.
We don't fabricate guest experiences
We never invent reviews, never quote a guest we didn't actually scrape, and never write first-person prose pretending we stayed there. The pet themes and summary on each page are paraphrased from real reviews; we cite no reviewer because we don't publish their identities.
We don't trust hotels' own marketing copy
A hotel calling itself pet-friendly on its own website doesn't earn it a listing here. The evidence is real guests writing about their pet's experience after the fact, not the property's marketing assertions.
We don't disclose AI authorship as a quality claim
The summary copy on each page is drafted with AI assistance and editorially checked. Our <a href="/ai-use-disclosure">AI use disclosure</a> describes the process. We never claim AI gives our reviews authority — the authority is the data we cite.
Refresh cadence
Travel inventory ages quickly. Three different cycles keep the data fresh:
- Affiliate URL + price: minted at publish time. When you click through to Agoda, you see current availability.
- Pet-mention reviews: re-scraped on a rolling basis. Hotels with thin review history are re-checked more often than ones with established review patterns.
- Hotel facts (address, photos, room count): refreshed when the Agoda affiliate inventory updates, typically quarterly.
If a hotel's policy changes in a way our latest scrape hasn't yet caught — for example a new pet supplement, or a breed restriction — the booking flow at Agoda is always the source of truth at the moment you book. We strongly recommend an email to the property before booking if you're travelling with anything larger than a medium-sized dog, or with more than two.
Limitations we'd like you to know about
No methodology is perfect, and ours has known limits:
- Coverage skew: we can only score hotels that have pet-mention reviews on Agoda. Properties popular with pet owners surface first; rural and newly-opened properties may be underrepresented even when they're excellent.
- Recency bias: a hotel can earn a strong paw rating early and coast on it. We re-check, but the headline number can lag by a refresh cycle if standards slip.
- UK-only at present: the entire inventory is UK properties. We have no immediate plans to expand abroad — covering the UK well is the priority.
- One source platform: reviews come from Agoda. Hotels' own websites, Tripadvisor, Booking.com and others sometimes carry pet-relevant context we don't see. We're transparent about this rather than claiming a fuller picture than we have.
Spot a problem?
If a paw rating doesn't reconcile against your own experience at a property — too high, too low, or just out of date — we want to know. Please drop us a note with the hotel name and what you observed; we'll re-check it against the source reviews and update the page if the data supports a change.
For broader policy or process questions, our editorial policy covers how we choose what to cover, fact-check, and handle corrections across the whole site.