Most pet travel information is a filter checkbox. A site tells you a hotel is “pet friendly” or a beach is “dog friendly” and stops there – no fee, no weight limit, no hours, no leash rule, and no way to tell when anyone last looked. Then you drive four hours and find out.
This page explains exactly what we check, what we do not, and how to tell the difference on any page of this site.
What “checked” means here
It means one specific thing: somebody read the rule at its source and wrote down what it said, with a link back to it.
For a beach, that source is the city ordinance, the county park page, the state park’s own rules or the managing agency – not a travel blog, and not another list site. For a hotel, it is the property’s own stated policy. For a vet or an animal shelter, it is that organization’s own site or the county page that names it. Where a rule is set by a code section, we read the code section.
Every factual listing on this site carries a link to the source it came from. If an entry has no link, we could not confirm it, and it is not on the page.
What it does not mean
- It does not mean we have been there. We have driven a lot of Florida with a dog, but not to all 72 dog beaches. Where we have personal experience of a place, it is marked “We’ve been here” with a note saying why – and that is the only endorsement on this site.
- It is not a recommendation. Being listed means a place exists and we found its rule. We do not rank vets, we do not rate shelters, and nobody pays to be included.
- It is not permanent. Florida rules change – for turtle nesting, after a hurricane, or because a council voted last Tuesday. Every directory page carries the month we last checked it. Always follow the source link before you drive.
When we could not confirm something, we leave it out
This is the part that takes the longest and shows the least. While building the dog beach directory we left out a beach in Miami that half the internet lists as a dog beach, because Miami-Dade publishes no pet policy for it. We left the sand at Cedar Key off the page because the city code contains no ban and no permission. We are holding back a Fort Lauderdale permit price because the city’s page and the city’s code disagree, and a Mexico Beach stretch that would flip from banned to allowed on a single phone call.
A missing entry is cheap. A wrong “dogs allowed” costs somebody a fine, or worse.
When official sources are wrong
It happens more than you would think, and it is worth saying out loud. The City of Daytona Beach’s own beach page still says pets are banned, after the county opened a 1.7-mile dog stretch. Neptune Beach’s page still publishes hours its council repealed in 2023. The Florida state park system’s own “pet friendly” filter returns every park in the system, including the ones that ban pets outright.
Where we found a conflict, the page says so and links to the rule that actually governs.
How often it gets re-checked
There are three layers, and they are not the same thing.
Automated checking: not running yet. Today no part of this site is re-checked by a machine.
Automated checking: scheduled to begin in December 2026. It will cover hotel pet policies and fees and each city’s quick facts, about 390 recorded facts in all, on a rolling cycle so each one comes back around roughly every three months. When it finds a difference, it produces a link with the source for a person to read – it never edits a page on its own. A machine that quietly “corrects” a phone number is worse than no checking at all. It does not cover the rest of the site.
Manual review: everything else, today. Beach and park rules, vet, shelter and county listings, laws and agency rules, restaurants and tours are each read at their source by a person, and the directory pages show the month of that last check. They are re-checked when a reader reports a change and when we review a section, not on a fixed schedule. Where a page says “currently” or “as of,” that is true as of its last check, not necessarily as of today.
The photographs
Every photo on this site was taken by us, on our own trips around Florida, with our own dogs. There is no stock photography here. When a photo shows habitat rather than the animal or place a page is about, the caption says so.
Money, plainly
Some links on this site are affiliate links – mainly hotel bookings and a few pieces of gear – and we may earn a commission at no cost to you. We also sell our own shirts. None of that affects what gets listed or what a page says: the county pet help pages carry no hotel links at all, and no business has ever paid to appear anywhere on this site.
Tell us when we are wrong
If a number has changed, a place has closed, or a rule is different from what we published, send it over. Corrections that come with a source get made the same day.
