A phenomenon that has changed the landscape of the local dog walking industry in the last few years is the emergence of a company called Wag. Wag is a national company based in California that is known for providing on-demand dog walks, GPS walk tracking and has a very easy-to-use website and smart phone app.
Wag is the first company to ever successfully create a national dog walking company. For the last thirty years, dog walking companies were all local entities only. Many were (and still are) quite small, and usually only covered a portion of city or town—let alone an entire country. But Wag believed that it could make inroads into the local, fragmented dog walking marketplace with their business model and technology (“the Uber of dog walking”), and was backed by many impressive financiers with deep pockets.
As Wag grew, and spent millions in marketing dollars to attract dog walking clients and dog walkers in many local markets, they unfortunately also developed a reputation for: being difficult to reach on the telephone for both clients and their own walkers; for losing, injuring or even killing pets in their care; and for not being as transparent and empathetic when such negative situations occurred.
On a more positive note, Wag’s disruptive emergence inspired positive changes in how many local dog walking companies conducted their own businesses as well. Many of them, including Park Cities Pet Sitter, chose to place a greater focus on utilizing technology to manage staff and client appointments, to highlight their more robust screening and training criteria, and to look more closely on how to make the customer onboarding process for new dog walking clients less arduous.
Wag’s use of technology to manage their business has clearly helped drive change in local pet sitting and dog walking businesses. But technology is not the only criteria you should use to gauge whether or not to use a particular pet sitting or dog walking service.
We have created a detailed table (below) on differences between how Park Cities Pet Sitter runs their business and how national companies like Wag (and Rover.com) do. Our hope is that anyone looking for a Dallas dog walker or Dallas pet sitter would keep all of these criteria in mind, then make the best decision for their personal situation.
