An enrichment boarding tier justifies a 30-50% premium when it bundles genuinely additional, staff-time-intensive services, structured playgroups, extra one-on-one attention, training reinforcement, or enrichment activities, into one clearly priced package rather than a handful of loose add-ons a client has to assemble themselves.
PocketSuite powers 7,000+ service businesses, including 1,000+ pet service businesses, whose clients have collectively processed nearly $1 billion in income and scheduled over 9.2 million appointments.
Reservations lets a business define an enrichment tier as its own bookable service, with its own price, capacity, and deposit, distinct from standard boarding, so the premium is presented as a complete offering rather than a confusing list of optional extras layered on at checkout.
The pricing gap only holds up if the tier delivers something a client can feel and see: more one-on-one time, a documented enrichment activity, a training touchpoint their dog would not get in standard boarding. A tier that is priced 30-50% higher without a clearly different experience behind it is a hard sell, no matter how it is packaged.
What Belongs in an Enrichment Tier
A defensible enrichment tier typically bundles a few concrete elements: extra structured playgroup time, a daily one-on-one walk or training session, photo or video updates sent to the owner, and any add-on services a facility already offers individually, now included rather than upsold separately. Packages can be used to bundle those elements into one upfront-priced offering, which is part of what makes the tier feel like a genuine upgrade rather than a markup.
Reservations keeps the enrichment tier’s capacity separate from standard boarding, so a facility can staff and price it as its own distinct offering rather than trying to retrofit the premium onto a general boarding slot.
Pricing the Tier So the Premium Holds Up
Pocket Suite answers exactly that client retention aspect… I feel like Pocket Suite has done an incredible job of putting those things together in probably about as simple of a platform as you could come up with.
Cybill Stilwell, Sit Means Sit East GA
Tracking Whether the Tier Actually Earns Its Premium
Income Reports shows how much revenue the enrichment tier is actually generating against standard boarding, which makes it possible to see whether the 30-50% premium is holding at real booking volume, not just on paper. A tier that looks good in a pricing spreadsheet but rarely gets booked at that price is a signal to adjust either the price or what is included.
Add-on revenue is where the highest-performing pet businesses separate from the rest of the field. “2026 Pet Boarding, Daycare & Resort Industry Benchmarking Report” (International Boarding and Pet Services Association, The Dog Gurus, PocketSuite, and Researchscape International, 2026) (source) found that 72% of $1M+ businesses see add-on purchases on 4 or more of every 10 bookings, compared with only 18% of sub-$150K operators, a 54-percentage-point gap that is the widest the study found in any category.
Marketing the Tier as a Genuine Upgrade
A clear name, a specific list of what is included, and a price that reflects real added staff time are what make an enrichment tier read as a premium experience rather than an upsell. Framing matters: clients respond to a described experience, structured playgroups, daily one-on-one time, more than they respond to a generic label like “premium.”
Staffing the Tier Without Overcommitting
Because an enrichment tier promises more staff time per dog, it needs its own capacity limit, set through Reservations, so a facility does not oversell one-on-one attention it cannot actually deliver on a given day. Capping enrichment bookings separately from standard boarding keeps the premium experience consistent even on a fully booked week.
A tier that occasionally gets overbooked and delivers a watered-down version of what was promised does more damage to a business’s reputation than simply not offering the tier at all, which is why the capacity limit is not optional if the premium is going to hold.
Introducing the Tier to Existing Clients
Existing boarding clients are the easiest first audience for a new enrichment tier, since they already trust the business and understand the baseline experience they are upgrading from. A short, targeted message through Smart Campaigns introducing the new tier to recent boarding clients tends to generate the first bookings faster than waiting for new clients to discover it.
Deciding What Not to Include
A tier that tries to include everything a business can think of tends to become expensive to deliver and hard to price consistently. The strongest enrichment tiers are usually built around two or three genuinely differentiated elements done well, rather than a long list of minor extras that stretch staff thin without meaningfully changing the client’s experience.
Starting narrow and adding to the tier later, once it is clearly working and staff have a feel for delivering it consistently, is generally a safer path than launching an ambitious version that is difficult to staff from day one.
Reviewing the Tier After the First Few Months
A new enrichment tier is worth a formal review after its first full season: how often it actually gets booked, whether Income Reports shows it earning a meaningfully higher margin than standard boarding once added staff time is accounted for, and whether clients who booked it are asking for it again on their next stay. That real-world feedback is what turns a reasonable first guess at pricing into a tier that reliably earns its premium.
Learning From Early Bookings Before Scaling Up
The first handful of enrichment bookings tend to reveal the gap between a tier as planned on paper and a tier as actually delivered on a real day, whether the promised one-on-one time is realistic given current staffing, whether the photo updates are genuinely being sent consistently, whether clients are asking for something the current package does not include yet.
Treating those first few bookings as a working pilot, adjusting the Reservations details and the price if needed before promoting the tier more broadly, produces a stronger, more sustainable offering than committing to a fixed version from day one and hoping it holds up at scale.
Why the Name and Description Matter as Much as the Service
A tier called simply “Enrichment Add-On” tends to underperform one with a name and description that paint a specific picture of the dog’s day, structured play sessions, a dedicated walk, enrichment activities tailored to the dog’s energy level. Clients are paying for an experience they can picture, and the words used to describe the tier do real work in making that experience feel tangible before a client ever books it.
Pairing a clear, specific description with a bookable listing on the Reservations setup gives a facility everything it needs to launch the tier cleanly: a distinct service, a defined capacity, and language that actually sells the premium rather than just naming it.
Treating the Tier as a Long-Term Addition
An enrichment tier that is well-defined, properly capped, and honestly described tends to become a durable part of a facility’s revenue mix rather than a short-lived promotion, precisely because it delivers on what it promises every time it is booked.
Where Enrichment Fits Into a Broader Growth Strategy
Add-on and premium-tier revenue is one of the clearest ways a boarding or daycare business grows income without needing more kennels, more square footage, or more total bookings, since the same reservation volume generates meaningfully more revenue once a portion of clients opt into a well-built premium tier. For a facility already running near capacity on standard boarding, an enrichment tier is often the most direct lever available for real revenue growth.
Built well and priced honestly, an enrichment tier turns existing demand into more revenue without asking a facility to expand its physical footprint at all.
For a facility ready to launch its first enrichment tier, the surest path forward is starting narrow, pricing it around real added staff time, and letting the first season of bookings prove the concept before scaling it further.
Concrete, staff-time-intensive services like structured playgroup time, daily one-on-one attention, training reinforcement, and regular photo or video updates bundled into one package.
Yes, when the tier includes services a client can clearly see and feel beyond standard boarding, not just a higher price on the same experience.
It can be set up as its own bookable service with its own price and capacity, distinct from the standard boarding offering.
Revenue reporting can show how much the enrichment tier is generating against standard boarding at real booking volume, not just on paper.
Yes, the widest performance gap in the 2026 Pet Boarding Benchmarking Report was in add-on revenue, where top-performing businesses far outpaced smaller operators.
