The State of Pet-Friendly Travel in India: What the Data Actually Shows in 2026

A few months ago, someone posted online looking for a hotel in Dehradun that would take their two puppies for a family wedding. Every "pet friendly" tag they found turned out to mean nothing once they actually called. That single thread is still getting views today, and it turns out to be a symptom of something much bigger than one bad search.

Pet-friendly travel in India isn't a niche trend anymore. It's a measurable, fast-growing shift in how Indians plan holidays, and the data backs it up from every direction, airlines, booking platforms, hospitality investors, and pet industry researchers alike.

Pet ownership in India is young, new, and growing fast

India's pet care market was valued at USD 8.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to keep expanding through the next decade, according to IMARC Group. But the more telling number isn't the market size, it's who's driving it.

Mars Petcare's Global Pet Parent Survey found that 69% of Indian pet owners are first-time pet parents, compared to 47% globally. India isn't a country with a long-established pet-owning culture gradually digitizing, it's a country where pet ownership itself is new for most people who have one right now.

And it's generationally led. A Supertails survey of over 500 Indian pet owners found that post-pandemic pet adoption skews Gen Z (48%) ahead of Millennials (44%), driven by urbanization, nuclear family structures, and what the industry calls pet humanization, treating a pet less like an animal to manage and more like a family member whose comfort actually matters. Separately, 64% of Indian pet owners now describe their pet as a family member rather than simply a pet, according to industry analysis from Meyka.

This matters for travel specifically, because a generation that sees a dog as family doesn't leave family behind when they go on holiday.

Pets are now shaping where and how people travel

The clearest evidence isn't survey sentiment, it's booking behavior.

MakeMyTrip recorded a 43% rise in bookings for pet-friendly accommodation in just the first four months of 2025. Air India carried more than 7,000 pets in FY2024-25, a 33.7% year-on-year increase, according to data reported by The Economic Times. Akasa Air reported a 26% increase in pet bookings over the same period.

But the more interesting number is about how Indians are choosing to travel with pets in the first place. Booking.com research, reported by ETTravelWorld, found that 93% of Indian pet-owning travellers prefer road trips over flying. Only a minority choose air travel at all. That single number explains a lot about the shape of pet travel demand in India: it isn't concentrated around airports and flagship hotel chains, it's spread across highway routes, hill stations, and weekend-drive distances from major cities, exactly the kind of destinations that don't get covered by big aggregator platforms with much depth.

Hospitality is responding, unevenly

India's broader hospitality market is on a genuinely steep growth curve, projected to go from USD 27.96 billion in 2026 to USD 55.67 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of roughly 14.76%, according to Mordor Intelligence. Domestic travel, rising disposable income, and better road and air connectivity are the primary drivers.

Some of that growth is now visibly pet-shaped. Hotels are moving past simply tolerating pets toward designing for them, pet beds, feeding bowls, designated walking areas, pet menus, and in some cases dedicated pet-friendly packages. Chains like Taj and Oberoi have introduced pet-specific offerings in select properties.

But "some properties" is the operative phrase. The shift is real, but it's concentrated in a small number of visible, often expensive properties, while the vast majority of hotels, resorts, and homestays that get tagged "pet friendly" on booking platforms were never actually verified to mean anything by that label.

The gap nobody's really solving yet

This is where the data stops being reassuring and starts explaining a real problem.

A recent industry piece on pet travel in India put it plainly: the phrase "pet friendly" can mean completely different things depending on the property, some accept only dogs below a certain size, others restrict pets from restaurants, pools, or common areas entirely, and plenty simply haven't updated an old listing in years. The growth in demand has outpaced the growth in reliable information.

That's not a hospitality problem. It's a trust and verification problem, and it's the exact gap we built petfriendlyplaces.in to close. Every listing on the platform carries a verification tier, whether we personally stayed there with our own dogs, whether our team called and confirmed the policy directly, or whether it's simply listed pending confirmation, so pet parents know exactly how much to trust a "pet friendly" label before they book, not after they arrive.

What this means going forward

The numbers point in one clear direction: pet-friendly travel in India isn't a passing trend riding on cute Instagram content, it's backed by real booking growth across airlines, OTAs, and the broader hospitality economy, driven by a young, first-time pet-owning population that treats their pets as family.

The businesses and destinations that win this decade won't just be the ones that allow pets. They'll be the ones that make "pet friendly" mean something you can actually trust, before you've packed the car.

Sources: IMARC Group (India Pet Care Products Market), Mars Petcare Global Pet Parent Survey, Supertails "Pawrents" Survey, Meyka industry analysis, The Economic Times (via ETTravelWorld), Booking.com research, Mordor Intelligence (India Hospitality Market Overview).

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