Window room or quiet room: which suits your cat

When you book a room here you are asked one real question: window or no window. A Garden Room is 4 by 6 feet with a window, at $30 a night. A Standard Room is the same 4 by 6 feet without one, at $25. Everything else about the two rooms is identical.

People almost always assume the window is better and pay the extra without thinking about it. Often it is. Sometimes it genuinely is not, and it is worth five minutes of thought rather than defaulting.

The cats the window is made for

If your cat spends her time at home in a window, on the back of a sofa watching the yard, or on a sill following birds, she will spend her stay doing the same thing here. For those cats a window is not decoration, it is occupation. It gives a boarding day a structure that an empty room cannot.

Confident cats, young cats and bored cats all tend to do better with something moving to look at. So do long stays. Two weeks in a room with a view is a different experience from two weeks in a room without one, and if you are away for a while the window is the easiest upgrade there is.

The cats a quiet room is genuinely better for

The opposite cat exists and is more common than people expect. A nervous cat, a cat who hides under the bed when visitors come, or a cat who has never lived anywhere with much going on outside, can find a window to be one more thing to monitor rather than something to enjoy.

For a cat like that, a room with four calm walls is not a downgrade. It is fewer things to react to. Cats who came from a shelter, cats recovering from illness, and very old cats often settle faster in a Standard Room than in a Garden Room, and they are the ones we would actively suggest it for.

If you genuinely do not know which she is, the honest answer is that both rooms are the same size, both get cleaned daily and both have a cat tree. Neither choice is a mistake.

Families of three or more

If you are boarding three cats or more from the same household, the choice changes. There are two rooms at 6 by 6 feet and one at 5 by 6 kept specifically for larger families, because littermates and long term housemates settle much faster together than they do apart.

Only cats from the same family are ever allowed to mingle, so a shared room is never shared out with a stranger. Pricing works in your favour here as well: three or more cats in one suite are $10 per cat per night, against $25 for a single cat in her own room.

Two cats who do not actually like each other

Worth saying, because people book on household rather than on relationship. If your two cats coexist at home by using different rooms and avoiding each other, putting them in one 4 by 6 suite removes the avoidance that was keeping the peace.

In that situation two separate rooms is the better booking even though it costs more. An additional cat sharing a suite is $12 a night, so the gap is smaller than people assume, and a week of forced proximity is not worth saving it.

The things you can add to either room

Both room types take the same additions. A filtered water fountain is $8 for the stay, which is worth it for a cat who is fussy about still water or who does not drink enough at the best of times. A heated bed is $6 for the stay and is a genuine kindness for an older or arthritic cat, or for a winter stay.

• Garden Room, 4 by 6 feet with a window, $30 a night
• Standard Room, 4 by 6 feet without a window, $25 a night
• Larger rooms for three or more cats from one family, $10 per cat per night
• Filtered water fountain $8 for the stay, heated bed $6 for the stay

Ask for a room by name

Every room here has a name, and they are all named after somewhere warm. Meowtle Beach, Catzumel, Bahamouse, Kitty Largo, Fort Litterdale. If your cat had a room she settled in last time, ask for it again by name when you book and you will get it if it is free.

Repeat guests going back into a room they already know is the closest thing boarding has to a shortcut. She has been there, it smells right, and the settling in happens in an afternoon rather than a day.