Mary-Alice’s dog travel blog and how-to book take the worry out of traveling with your pet

Mary-Alice Pomputius started writing Dog Jaunt, her blog about traveling with a pet dog, when she had to bring her new puppy to Seattle from San Diego and could not find any good, detailed information about flying with an in-cabin pet. During the first month she owned Chloe, they went on three big trips together, and they’ve traveled extensively in the U.S. and abroad over the past four and half years.

The blog began as a notebook, recording what Mary-Alice learned as she and her husband traveled with Chloe, but it rapidly attracted readers, and is now the hub of a involved and mutually supportive dog travel community. Traveling with a pet (as opposed to a service animal) is a topic that generates a lot of interest and, often, passion.

According to info gathered by HomeAway, “an estimated 29.1 million Americans say they traveled with a pet in the last three years.” In large part, that’s because pet ownership is changing in nature, particularly in North America and Western Europe. Increasingly, pets are being given the kind of attention and care formerly reserved for children. Also, as more resources become available to travelers with pets, bringing a pet along on a vacation trip is an increasingly attractive and affordable option. Indeed, pet travel often makes economic sense, given the cost of pet boarding.

Setting cost-benefit analyses aside, Mary-Alice believes the main benefit of traveling with a pet is that it improves the trip. Mary-Alice first flew overseas when she was six (at the time, Frommer’s assured readers that Europe could be enjoyed on a budget of $5 a day), and has studied, lived, and traveled abroad frequently in the decades since. Hand on her heart, she’ll tell you that traveling with Chloe is much more fun than traveling without her: With Chloe along, she absorbs neighborhoods and sights at a walking pace, meets and engages with locals — and never feels lonely or adrift.

In an effort to make the experience of dog travel as accessible as possible for others, Mary-Alice published Bone Voyage: Travel With Your Pet in September 2013. The book covers the best dog-friendly destinations, finding pet-friendly hotels and places to eat, and the logistics of flying, driving, and taking trains, boats, buses, etc. with your pet dog. She devotes a chapter to “the three pees” (preparation, paperwork, and packing), and worries with you about the things that can go wrong — and offers solutions. Bone Voyage is currently available on Kindle, with other e-books and print-on-demand to follow.

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Media contact: Mary-Alice Pomputius, [email protected]