Guide to choosing dog walks
5 good tips for choosing professional dog walker for your dog
When Hellerup Dog Walk started walking dogs in 2014, there were only a few professional dog walkers and no professional dog nurseries. Since then, the range has grown considerably, but how do you find the right, skilled and professional dog walker for your dog?
Of course, we think you should chooseHellerup Dog Walk as your dog's future dog walker, but we would still like to give you some good advice on the road if you live outside our driving range, or for other reasons are considering a alternative to the Hellerup Dog Walk.
If you follow the instructions below, you are well on your way to finding a skilled and trustworthy dog walker for your four-legged family member!
1. Research which professional dog walkers offer pickup in your area.
Google can be of help, but unfortunately not all professional dog walkers are indexed and many are not quite clear about exactly which areas they walk in. If you get lost on the web, we at Hellerup Dog Walk know the market for professional dog walkers quite well. Contact us and we will do what we can to help you find a professional dog walker in your area! Hellerup Dog Walk currently offers our dog nursery in the following municipalities: Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Herlev, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rudersdal and Hørsholm.
2. Air trips or dog nursery?
When researching the market for professional dog walkers in your area, also consider the length of walks you are interested in taking your dog. The vast majority of professional dog walkers offer walks of 45-60 minutes (excluding driving time). Hellerup Dog Walks unique Hundebørnehave are air tours of a full 2.5 hours! (excluding driving time), which is approx. 3 times as much air as a normal air ride. You can see a video presentation of our unique Dog Kindergarten here:
3. Search for and read about the experiences of other dog owners!
We cannot stress enough how important this is! Professional dog walking is a matter of trust and a good starting point for building trust is to read about what experiences other dog owners have had with the particular dog walker you are considering. Use Google's and Facebook's search engines to find reviews and discussion posts on various dog discussion sites and don't just read the reviews that the company in question has posted on their own website. In short, you should go for a company with many good reviews on Facebook, Google and/or Trustpilot and (obviously) avoid companies with bad or no reviews. Try HERE to read Hellerup Dog Walk's many 5-star reviews on Facebook from our dog parents over the last 5 years.
Here below you can find a small selection of these many Facebook reviews and a link directly to the review so you can verify it. To read the review, click on the image or hover over it.
4. Ask questions about air time and transport time
Once you have found a professional dog walker with good reviews, have a good chat with him/her about the tours and their content. Style e.g. following questions:
* How long will my dog be away from home?
* How long will my dog actually be out in nature and how long is the transport time to and from the trip?
* How many playmates are on the trips?
* Are the dogs let out somewhere with or without fencing?
A serious professional dog walker should be able to give some clear answers to the above questions! In Hellerup Dog Walk, we are proud of our long air time of 2.5 hours in our Dog Kindergarten and the relatively relatively short driving time of an average of 1 hour (max 2 hours), which is only possible because we have existed for so many years and has so many dog parents, which means that we can plan our routes super efficiently and optimally.
5. Go for an experienced dog walker!
Hellerup Dog Walk has also once had no experience and we are happy and proud that we have nevertheless succeeded in getting so many dog owners to choose us already in the first years of our existence. A professional dog walker with little or no experience does not necessarily have to be a bad choice, but by choosing an experienced dog walker, the probability is always greater that your dog will be walked by someone who can read your dog and the pack and thereby can plan the trip and intervene in situations in time so that your dog has as safe a trip as possible. Hellerup Dog Walk has been walking dogs since the beginning of 2014 and therefore has many thousands of hours of experience in managing and leading a pack of dogs, so that everyone thrives and that safety is top notch!