Dog Boarding Facilities in Maryland

marnja says:
2010-06-16 16:44:12

We have been taking our dog to the Whiteflint Dogtopia since 2008. Over the past several months we had noticed that the new management translated into constant staff turnover, lack of attention to detail, and an overall loss of loving care previously provided. Bottom line, learn from our experience and do not trust the care of your dog to Dogtopia. The new manager is doing an inadequate job of kee... view full comment

We have been taking our dog to the Whiteflint Dogtopia since 2008. Over the past several months we had noticed that the new management translated into constant staff turnover, lack of attention to detail, and an overall loss of loving care previously provided. Bottom line, learn from our experience and do not trust the care of your dog to Dogtopia. The new manager is doing an inadequate job of keeping customers satisfied. We recently boarded our dog here for 2 weeks. Upon our return, we were shocked to find out that they had not followed our feeding instructions (clearly written, provided to them prior to our trip, and verbally verified/documented on the computer). We did not notice this error until we started to comment to each other that our dog had lost weight and opened his travel bag only to find out at least 75% of the dry food we had provided untouched. We are assuming that they fed him the chicken/rice wet food we had provided and ignored/forgot about adding the dry food to his plate. So clearly, this shows that they can not follow and be trusted with simple feeding instructions. To make the situation worse, our dog had an accident the 1st night he was boarded and had a minor injury. The staff did not contact us to inform us of the incident. We found out about the incident 2 weeks later on the day of our pickup and were horribly upset. The documentation is an absolute mess - the person at the counter told us the incident had occurred on June 3rd while the manager told us the incident had occurred on May 31st. The manager acknowledged that they had made an error in not notifying us but blamed his staff for not following through with the procedure. He openly acknowledged that his staff required more training and that in the future, he plans to take care of such notifications himself. Apparently, as customers, we are expected to pay money, not expect trained staff, and yet trust the care of our dogs to Dogtopia. The manager noted that he was out for an entire week and had no knowledge of what had happened to our dog until his return. Yet when we had called Dogtopia to inquire about the well-being of our dog, he had personally answered the phone and reassured us that our dog was doing fine & made no mention of the incident. His staff had obviously not followed our instructions to contact us in case of an emergency and/or an incident with our dog. Interestingly, it was documented that they had contacted us. Therefore, someone either lied about having contacted us or was so incompetent that he/she was not able to complete the paper work correctly. We requested to speak to the staff member who had first discovered the incident with our dog. We were told that she would be contacted. We found out later that afternoon that she had left the position and was no longer employed at the site. Therefore, we have been unable to speak with her to find out exactly what happened. Overall, our recent experience has been horrible. We are filing a report with the Better Business Bureau and refuse to trust these individuals with the care of our dog in the future. Sad to say that a good business concept has gone to the dogs! We have tried to invest time to provide constructive feedback to management. As indicated earlier, we had a good experience with this establishment for 2 years and built a trusting relationship with them. However, the new management is simply not satisfactory. Dogtopia at this location seems to be short staffed and in our case, they have made a consistent number of errors - i.e., not calling us immediately when an incident with our dog occurred, giving us inaccurate information when we called to check up on our dog, giving the wrong amount of food to our dog and not taking accountability for it, and having poor documentation of the incident. If you love your dog (and you must if you're doing research on places such as Dogtopia), do not trust this business with your dog. I promise that if they continue in the same path, sooner or later, you will have a similar experience with them view short comment