Paws Friendly started out of the frustration of not knowing which restaurants and cafes were dog-friendly.
As a dog mom spending 9 hours a day at work, I hated the idea of going to meet friends for a drink in the evening and leaving Poppy behind. I would return home feeling so guilty about it if I didn't take her with me. During the fair weather months, it was never a problem to find a restaurant with a patio, especially living in Mallorca. It started to get a bit tricky once the temperature dropped and it was no longer enjoyable to sit outside. Most restaurants/cafes do not readily display their pet-policies, and I would feel bad making my friends go from place to place until we found somewhere that would allow dogs inside. (Or I would end up hiding her in my bag.)
I wanted to develop a platform that would make it easy for pet-owners to discover pet-friendly businesses near them. During its evolution I realized that I didn’t want the site to just be a list of dog-friendly restaurants, instead I wanted it to become an interactive platform where businesses could write about themselves, their pet-friendly amenities and services offered, as well as customers being able to rank and review them based on their paw-friendliness.
With the onset of Covid-19 the importance of spending our money locally and supporting independently run businesses became all the more apparent. As we started spending more and more hours at home with our pets, the importance of them for our own wellbeing and happiness became more apparent. I wanted the site to be a platform that could help pet-friendly businesess and the growing dog-owner market.
I normally live in Palma de Mallorca but have relocated to Ireland for the winter. I have slowly been populating these two places but the site is designed so that dog-owners can easily discover new places near them, as well as add their favorite dog-friendly places to the site. Once you add your a pet-friendly business to website, I then confirm with the business owner before publishing it, so that no paws turns up disappointed. I hope that as time goes on, more features can be added, more bugs worked out and overall more businesses will see the importance of being PawsFriendly.
Our goal is to make sure that No Paws Are Left Behind.
XoXo,
Amanda & Poppy