FMK Stories · Pricing
The Luxury Kennel Myth
Kennels that call themselves luxury, resort or suites charge almost exactly what everyone else charges — and advertise barely more. We measured the advertised nightly rates to find out what the word buys.
Premium-named vs plainly-named kennels
- $44
- median rate, premium-named
- $45
- median rate, plainly named
- −$1
- difference per night
- 12.3%
- of priced kennels claim a premium name
141 kennels
1,001 kennels
The finding
There is no premium. Kennels that put a luxury word in their name advertise a median of $44a night. Kennels that don’t advertise $45. The premium-named kennels are, if anything, $1 cheaper at the median.
The spread tells the same story. Premium-named kennels run $35–$55 between the 25th and 75th percentile; plainly-named ones run $35–$55. These are the same business at the same price with a different sign out front.
They don't offer more, either
The obvious objection is that premium-named kennels might be selling something real and simply pricing it competitively. So we counted how many amenities each group advertises — webcams, suites, playgroups, indoor/outdoor runs, a vet on site.
Premium-named kennels advertise an average of 2.63 amenities. Plainly-named kennels advertise 2.52. That is a difference of 0.11 of one amenity — which is to say, no difference at all. Whatever “luxury” is doing in a kennel name, it is not standing in for a longer list of things the dog gets.
What to do with this
Ignore the name. It carries no information about price and none about amenities, which makes it one of the least useful signals available to you when choosing where to board a dog. The things that do vary between kennels — whether there are webcams, whether staff are on site overnight, whether cats are boarded, whether a vet is on the premises — vary independently of what the business calls itself.
Two of those are genuinely rare, and we counted how rare in our audit of what facilities actually advertise. For what boarding really costs where you live, we measured that too: dog boarding cost by state.
The caveats
Advertised, not transacted. These are the rates kennels publish, which are typically the entry-level run on a standard night. A premium-named kennel may well sell more expensive suites that never appear as its headline price. What we can say is that its advertised starting point is no higher.
Name matching is literal. We match premium words in the business name only. A kennel positioned as luxury without saying so lands in the plain group, which if anything blunts the contrast rather than manufacturing it.
Sample. 141 premium-named and 1,001 plainly-named kennels publish a nightly rate. Kennels that publish no price are excluded rather than guessed at.
Where these numbers come from
We took every boarding kennel in our directory that publishes a nightly rate (1,142 of them), split them by whether the business name makes a premium claim — luxury, resort, suites, retreat, manor, chateau, estate, villa, spa — and compared what the two groups charge and how many amenities they advertise.
Every figure on this page is read from our own directory when the page builds, so it moves as the data does (collected June 2026). For the same dataset treated at full length — sample bars, percentiles and methodology — see FMK Research.