The Five Star Lie - How Forbes Travel and AAA Have Failed Dog Owners

Luxury hotel certifications are supposed to represent the gold standard of hospitality. When a hotel earns a prestigious five-star rating from bodies like the Forbes Travel Guide, or AAA, travellers assume they are stepping into a world of seamless service, impeccable accommodations, and thoughtful amenities.

But there’s a problem nobody talks about hiding beneath the glitz and glamour—one that millions of travellers face, but that the major certification bodies ignore entirely: what happens when you check in with a dog?

Five Stars, But Not If You Bring A Dog

Despite the explosion of dog-friendly travel, major certification bodies still operate as if dog owners don’t exist. Their rating systems don’t ask hotels any meaningful questions about their pet policies; they don’t evaluate whether a so-called ‘pet-friendly’ hotel actually welcomes dogs or tolerates them with an extortionate fee and a long list of restrictions.?

They never check if pet-friendly rooms are an afterthought, shoved in the worst part of the hotel where other guests won't see them, and restrict them from public spaces. And yet, these hotels proudly display their five-star badges, endorsed by certification bodies that never once considered whether dog owners would receive the same level of hospitality.

A good example of this is the?Mandarin Oriental in New York;?they like to boast about maintaining their Forbes Five-Star rating for 18 consecutive years; they also hold the prestigious AAA Five Diamond rating awarded to the best hotels.

Yet, despite these accolades, their use of the word pet-friendly almost feels fraudulent when you consider their policies, fees, restrictions, and lack of services or amenities, something neither Forbes nor AAA bothers to evaluate, ultimately setting dog owners up for a bitter disappointment.

This is one example of the certification blind spot, I have many more.

The Certification Blind Spot

Forbes, AAA, and other rating agencies focus on thread counts, wine lists, and spa treatments—but never on the experiences of dog-owning guests. Their oversight leads to situations where a hotel is rated as one of the world’s best, yet the moment you walk in with your dog, you’re treated as an inconvenience.

No questions are asked about pet policies. Certification bodies don’t even inquire whether dogs are welcome in rooms, public spaces, or dining areas.

Hidden fees go unchecked. Many 'pet-friendly' hotels charge extortionate, undisclosed fees, sometimes per night, per dog, these don't factor into ratings.

Service quality for dog owners is ignored. A hotel can refuse to provide a water bowl, fail to provide food, and ban them from the bar yet still be labelled ‘luxury’.

By failing to acknowledge dog owners, these agencies are failing millions of dog-owning travellers. Worse, they’re letting hotels get away with charging premium prices while delivering subpar guest experiences if you check in with a dog.

Luxury hotels pay Forbes a lot of money for their certification, and Forbes allegedly has a robust rating system covering up to 900 different criteria designed to measure guest experience. Yet, they neglect to ask hotels what pet-friendly might mean for dog-owning guests.

If a hotel claims to be pet-friendly but fails to deliver, it doesn't just disappoint guests; it calls into question the credibility of every certification body that lets their deceptive use of the words pet-friendly pass unchecked.

This Is A Problem For The Industry

I have already written at length about the bad actors, hotels so bad at being pet friendly that they actively undermine trust in our industry, create uncertainty, and alienate the fast-growing, high-spending, dog-owning traveller segment, diminishing the efforts of good dog-friendly hotels in the process. They make everyone look bad, including every hotel that prides itself on their dog-friendliness, and the problem is that dog owners can’t tell the difference between the good hotels and the bad pet-friendly actors!

Dog owners cannot tell the difference between you; they struggle to find good dog-friendly hotels, and those hotels struggle to punch through the pet-friendly marketing noise to communicate how great they are to dog owners.

A Certification Body That Asks the Right Questions

This is why Roch Dog exists, to ask the questions Forbes and AAA don’t. We verify a hotel's dog-friendly position instead of blindly accepting their ‘pet-friendly’ claims. We evaluate whether a hotel truly welcomes dogs or extorts guests with cleaning fees, and tight restrictions.

We gather granular data on a hotel's canine-focused policies, services, amenities, access levels, adjacencies, facilities, ancillaries, training, and inclusivity. This is a data-driven approach with fairness and integrity at its core. We leverage data science, run comparative analyses on hotels, compare them with their peers, and derive rank using a transparent and balanced cluster benchmarking model to accurately measure and rank a hotel's position based on its own data, data we gather directly from the hotels for accuracy.

We are named after the patron saint of dogs because we work to restore trust in the hotel industry for dog owners, drive transparency into the hotel space, and work hard to solve a real problem in our industry that nobody has tried to address, not in any meaningful way, for decades.

The industry doesn’t need more outdated five-star ratings that fail to consider dog owners; it needs a standard that reflects the reality of modern travel. Ignoring millions of dog-owning guests is not just an oversight—it’s negligence.