We got Biscuit three months before the twins started school. A golden retriever, obviously, because we apparently enjoy making our lives as complicated as possible. At the time, I genuinely thought: right, we are a family who holidays twice a year at minimum, how is this going to work?Â
*This is a collaborative post
I won’t pretend I didn’t have a quiet wobble about it. But here we are, three years on, and we have absolutely not stopped. What we have done is get a lot better at planning.
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What “Travelling With Your Dog” Actually Looks Like in the UK
There is a version of travelling with your dog that sounds idyllic in theory and is mostly fine in practice, and then there is the version nobody tells you about where your dog has rolled in something on the coastal path and the only dog-friendly pub for four miles has a one-hour wait. Both versions are real and we have lived them.
The practical reality of UK travel with a dog is that it requires a completely different planning process to what you did before. Dog-friendly accommodation is not a nice-to-have; it becomes the first filter you apply before you look at anything else. The good news is that the sector has genuinely changed. A University of Surrey study found the dog-friendly travel sector is projected to be worth nearly £40 billion by 2030, which tells you everything about how seriously providers are now taking it. Enclosed gardens, dog menus, dog-specific check-in packs — these are now standard at many properties, not exceptional ones.
On the train, dogs travel free on UK services, which is genuinely brilliant and makes a weekend in the Scottish Highlands or a jaunt down to Devon far more accessible than people assume. The rules are straightforward and worth reading on the National Rail website before you book, particularly if you are hoping to take more than one dog or use a sleeper service.
One thing that gets underestimated is how much the dog’s temperament shapes the holiday. Biscuit is sociable and fairly unbothered by new environments, which makes him a genuinely easy travel companion. Not every dog is. Research from the RSPCA suggests that eight out of ten dogs find it hard to cope when left alone, and half of those show no obvious signs of distress, so you may not even know there is a problem until it surfaces somewhere inconvenient, like a holiday cottage.
We have had three excellent UK breaks with Biscuit, all built around him being with us for the majority of the time. The Jurassic Coast, the Brecon Beacons, and a self-catering week in Northumberland where he genuinely looked happier than any of us. Those were the trips where logistics were relatively simple: dog comes, dog sleeps in the boot room, dog eats the same dinner he always eats, everyone is content.
When You Need the Dog Sorted, Not Taken Along
Then there are the trips where the dog simply cannot come. Long-haul is the obvious one. We took the twins to Florida for their seventh birthday and then, separately, to Virginia to visit Tristan’s cousins. Then we did two further trips to the States over the following eighteen months. Four times in total that we needed professional, reliable care for Biscuit while we were across the Atlantic for ten days or more at a stretch.
This is where we found Yourgi, and I want to be specific about why it worked so well for us rather than just saying “we used a dog sitter and it was great,” which is not actually useful to anyone. Yourgi is a pet care platform operating across multiple US cities as a local pet care service including Denver, Dallas, Houston, Boston, and Portland, and what sets it apart is something they call the Yourgi Guarantee: if the care doesn’t meet your expectations, your costs are reimbursed. For us, travelling from the UK and handing our dog over to someone we have never met in person, that guarantee mattered more than almost anything else.
We used them four times. Each time, Biscuit was looked after by a vetted professional through the platform, which offers boarding, walking, daycare, house sitting, grooming, and training alongside vet care. The first trip he was boarded. The second and third times we arranged house sitting so he stayed in a home environment rather than a kennel, which suited him far better given that he is a dog who has opinions about disruption to his routine. By the fourth trip we had enough experience with the platform to know exactly how to filter for what he needed.
The practical difference between Yourgi and simply finding a dog sitter through a Facebook group is the structure. You are not doing your own vetting. You are not making a judgement call about someone based on a few WhatsApp messages. There is accountability built in on both sides, and updates and photos came through consistently on every trip, which matters enormously when you are in a different time zone and cannot just pop home to check.
The Post-Brexit Reality for Taking Your Dog Abroad
If you are considering taking your dog to Europe, and I know many families are thinking about this as the Eurostar and ferry routes become more popular with kids in tow, the rules have changed significantly and are worth getting right before you book anything.
Since April 2026, residents of England, Scotland, and Wales can no longer use EU-issued pet passports to travel to EU countries, even if the passport was issued there. The GOV.UK guidance is clear: you now need an Animal Health Certificate issued by a vet, and it must be obtained within ten days of your departure date, which means you cannot do this months in advance. A new certificate is required for every individual trip. Your dog also needs to be microchipped and have a current rabies vaccination, with a 21-day wait after a first vaccination before travel is permitted.
For dogs travelling directly to Ireland, Finland, Norway, Northern Ireland, or Malta, tapeworm treatment is required between one and five days before arrival. This is administered by your vet and noted on the certificate. It sounds like a lot of steps, and it is, but once you have done it once and know what is needed, it becomes routine.
Flying with a dog from the UK is, for most people, not an option. UK airlines do not permit dogs in the cabin. The alternative is cargo, which is expensive, stressful for the animal, and not something we would consider for Biscuit. For European travel, ferry crossings with your dog are the realistic route, and several operators on key routes accommodate dogs well. For anything further afield, you are in the territory of arranging care at home.
How We Actually Make It Work
The honest answer is that we do not have one system. We have a decision we make at the start of each trip: is this a dog-comes holiday or a dog-needs-sorting holiday?
Dog-comes holidays are UK-based, built around dog-friendly accommodation found early in the planning process, and tend to involve more outdoor activity than our average trip anyway, which suits everyone. The twins have grown up knowing that finding somewhere Biscuit can sleep is part of the conversation, and they are genuinely good at it now. Poppy once spent twenty minutes reading the small print on a holiday cottage listing to confirm whether the enclosed garden was actually enclosed or “enclosed” in the optimistic estate-agent sense. She was seven.
Dog-needs-sorting holidays are longer, often involve flying, and require lead time to get the right care booked. For US trips, Yourgi gave us the infrastructure to sort this without it becoming a source of anxiety, which it absolutely was before we had a reliable platform to use. For European trips in future, the new paperwork requirements mean Biscuit would need to be with us from the start of planning, not an afterthought.
None of this is particularly complicated once you have done it a few times. It just requires treating the dog as a genuine part of the holiday equation rather than a problem to solve at the last minute. We have been doing it long enough now that it genuinely does not feel like a limitation. It is just the logistics, and logistics are the bit you sort before you go, so you can enjoy yourself when you get there.
Biscuit is currently asleep on the sofa, completely unaware that we are looking at flights to Kenya for next year. He will be fine.
