Destination Selection and Readiness for Pet Tourism: Travelling with Man’s Best Friend

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-705-7_30How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Pet-friendly; destination selection; travel; tourism

Abstract

This scoping review explores pet owners’ motivations and experiences when selecting destinations for accompanying pet travel to guide future research. A scoping review, followed by snowballing method were conducted, to counter limitations of each search method. Electronic databases used were SA e-publications, Scopus and Web of Science, the search criteria included publications within a five-year period between January 2020 to July 2025 and only in English. In order to identify emerging themes that addressed the research objectives and provided a narrative description of the data, an abstract screening process was conducted through Rayyan. Articles that did not meet set eligibility criteria like language, duplications, or irrelevant focus were excluded. Only four articles emerged from this screening. These “origin papers” were run through Connected Papers, and the snowballing process yielded a further 27 relevant articles. The total 31 articles highlighted emotional attachment as a powerful motivator for pet-owners traveling with their pets. Obstacles in destination selection pointed to exorbitant prices, a lack of suitable housing, transportation problems, and ambiguous regulations continue to exist. Availability of pet-focused services like safety, health, and accessible activities play a major role in destination selection, and many owners are willing to pay more for higher-quality options. The review also highlighted a critical gap in African focus of this research whereby tourism facilities do not accommodate the needs and priorities of pet owners when traveling to destinations.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zea Wilcox
AU  - Pavla Mokoena
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/13
TI  - Destination Selection and Readiness for Pet Tourism: Travelling with Man’s Best Friend
BT  - Proceedings of the FIREtalk Conference - Research on FIRE! (research-on-fire 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 423
EP  - 439
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-705-7_30
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-705-7_30
ID  - Wilcox2026
ER  -