Patricia Kaas with a small dog, Jean-Paul Belmondo with a Yorkshire terrier… Glossy magazines teem with photos of celebrities travelling around the world with their pets. Is it possible for ordinary people to stay in a Moscow hotel with a pet? One of the online Russian travel resources has decided to check it out by asking several Moscow hotels.

A cat or a dog seemed to the team of Tourist.ru to be a trivial variant and for the experiment they chose a popular nowadays pet – the mini-pig. If believe owners of such pets, mini-pigs are incredibly intelligent and social; they can be trained to seat, lie down, dance by a command, and even to use cat toilet tray for relieving nature. A mini-pig seems to be almost an ideal animal making almost no trouble to its owner and perhaps it must appear a desired guest at any hotel.

First Tourist.ru decides to call to 3 and 4-star hotels where prices for accommodations are supposed to be lower. In turns out that a conversation with all hotels evaluates under the same scenario: after a question about staying with animals follows a long pause. The puzzled reception girl usually resorts to help of her more experiences colleagues and then says no even without specifying what kind of animal the guest is going to stay with. If the mini-pig is mentioned, the pause was much longer. Almost no one knew what kind of animal it was. Neither persuading nor promises to pay a good amount of money for care worked.

Voice of the receptionist of Izmailovo hotel complex in Moscow showed sympathy towards the unlucky guest with the mini-pig:

- Ok, you can veil the cage and carry it in quietly; maybe no one will notice your pig.

- But what is a hotel maid comes to clean the room and sees the pig run around?

- Oh, IT also will run around the room??? Then no, certainly it’s impossible.

By the way, it was not the only hotel to advise bringing the pig to the hotel secretly.

Another hotel – Rusotel – advised to apply to the administration personally and talk over staying with the animal, as the hotel had once received guests (a basketball team) that had a dog with them. The hotel Sputnik also did not agree to accommodate a guest with the mini-pig and said it was possible to have only cats in the room.

5-star Moscow hotels did not show better results with the only difference that the hotel stuff demonstrated perfect knowledge of English and at once understood what animal the guest was talking about. However, they politely said no too, referring to the “hotel policy”, “rules”, or “administration’s opinion”.

The only hotel that seemed to be ready to meet guests with any animals was Novoslobodskaya hotel where the receptionist said “we have never met mini-pigs but will be glad to get acquainted with them”. Staying with this pet will cost its owner extra 1200 RUB per day. At the hotel they also assured that it was no problem if the animal stayed at the room all day as the maids were used to many kinds of pets.

The result is that only one hotel out of 20 where the staff of Tourist.ru called to allowed staying with the mini-pig. Interestingly, it seemed that the staff of the majority of the hotels was not ready to answer the question of this kind. While in western hotel guides they normally mention information about loyalty towards animals in rooms or put the strict “no pets”, the Russian hotels most likely try not to think about this issue at all and not to deal with non-standard cases.

Source:
    www.turist.ru

Lavrentyeva Natalya