A booster that runs out on day four
A cat is booked in for twelve nights over Christmas. The owner is a regular, so nobody looked closely at the card when she booked in October. On arrival day, staff notice the annual booster expires halfway through the stay. Your policy says a pet must be covered for the whole stay, which some catteries insist on and some do not, but either way it is now Christmas Eve and her vet is closed.
Whether you take the cat or not, somebody leaves unhappy, and the problem was entirely predictable. The date was written on a card months before anybody needed to act on it.
Dates nobody is watching
Vaccination checks, where they happen, are usually a one-off look at the card on the day. What nobody does is look forward: comparing expiry dates with bookings already in the diary for next month, next quarter or next summer.
- Bookings for peak weeks are made months ahead, when a booster may still be in date.
- Owners forget when their pet's booster is due, especially if it moved after a missed year.
- Some vaccines, such as kennel cough, have a lead time before your policy counts them, so late action does not help.
- Nobody has the time to look through every future booking against every card by hand.
It is a date comparison, which is exactly the kind of job people are bad at and computers are good at, once the dates are stored somewhere a computer can read.
Late surprises are expensive
A pet turned away on arrival day means an empty run you cannot refill at a few hours' notice, an owner scrambling for another option, and very often a bad review. Accepting a pet outside your own policy creates a different problem: you have broken your own rules and your records now show it.
Even when it ends well, with the owner rushing to a vet the day before, it is stress for everyone that a letter or text six weeks earlier would have avoided.
Forward checks on every future booking
We build a scheduled check that looks forward across your diary and warns people in good time.
- Vaccination dates are stored per pet, from uploads at booking or from records you already hold, which we can import.
- Each night the system compares every upcoming booking with those dates and the rules you set, including any lead time you require for a particular vaccine.
- Where a date falls short, the owner gets a clear message saying which date looks like it needs attention before their stay, and asking them to check with their vet and send the updated record.
- A staff list shows every pet flagged, when the owner was told and whether a new record has come in.
- When the owner uploads the new card, the dates are read and the flag clears once a person confirms.
| When the gap is found | What the owner gets |
|---|---|
| At the time of booking | A note on the confirmation asking for an update before the stay |
| Weeks before arrival | A reminder with the date and your policy wording |
| Days before arrival, still unresolved | A staff call, flagged on the daily list |
| Record updated | A thank-you and the flag cleared |
The wording of every message is yours, and it points owners to their own vet for anything about their pet's health. The system tracks dates and messages. It does not give vaccination advice.
The new version of Christmas Eve
The same Christmas cat is flagged in early November, the night after the booking is made. The owner gets a text, books the booster at her vet, uploads the new card from the car park, and staff confirm it the next morning. On Christmas Eve the drop-off takes five minutes.
Across the year, the flagged list becomes a normal part of the weekly admin rather than a crisis on arrival day.
Is this happening to you?
- You find lapsed boosters when the pet arrives.
- Nobody checks future bookings against vaccination dates.
- Owners tell you they had no idea the booster was due.
- You have had to decide on the spot whether to break your own policy.
- Peak bookings are made months ahead of the stay.