At Nashville’s Bobby Hotel, rescue dogs get the suite life and a new home

27.04.2024 - 15:05 / thepointsguy.com

For centuries, dogs have been bred to work and perform specific tasks. For example, Pembroke Welsh corgis often work as herding dogs and were "once invaluable to farmers in Wales," according to the American Kennel Club.

These days, though, dogs that were originally hard at work are now frequently found hardly working. Like my own corgi, Splenda, whose "job" is helping me — one of TPG's senior hotel reporters — to review luxurious pet-friendly hotels, like The Plaza in New York City. Ruff life, right?

In Nashville, at the Bobby Hotel, there's another type of job available to our four-legged friends: "dog-in-residence," a program that sees rescue dogs from the Nashville Humane Association undergo incredible training with experts followed by a gig "working" as the best, fluffiest and friendliest greeter in the hotel for a year before finally being placed in a fur-ever home with a U.S. veteran in need of companionship.

It all started with Sasha, an office dog from back before the hotel even opened that ultimately became the first dog-in-residence, Joel Morales, Bobby Hotel's chief marketing officer, told TPG. "We brought on a kind of office dog that, very quickly, from an idea perspective became: 'Hey, let's train her and have her in the lobby.'"

That idea stuck, and Sasha quickly became the most popular (slobbery) face at the Bobby Hotel, greeting guests and gifting smiles and tail wags in the lobby. During that time, Sasha lived with the hotel's front desk manager, but after three years, it was time for that employee to move on in life, and, as Morales explained, the hotel realized it was best for Sasha to retire so she could move on with the person who took her home every night.

"That's when we sat down and reexamined the program because we [had] to be realistic and can't assume that people are [going to] stay with us forever. So that's when we developed what it is today," said Morales. "Community is a big, big component of our brand. We wanted to give the dog a purpose, so we partnered with our local shelter, the Nashville Humane Association, and an organization called Pets for Patriots, which is a national organization that gives resources to vets who are looking to adopt pets, meaning they'll pay for adoption costs and for food, if they need that kind of help, to be able to have a pet or companion."

The Bobby Hotel also partnered with a training program called Instinct to help the dogs learn the ins and outs of hotel management — well, how to manage themselves in a hotel through social cues and boundary training so that, as Morales explained, the dogs-in-residence avoid certain areas of the hotels (like elevators and food service areas) and to understand when a guest wants to interact and when a