PawsVerified: Making the Pet-Policy Fine Print Visible

A hotel can call itself pet-friendly without answering the questions that actually matter to someone traveling with an animal. PawsVerified started with a more useful question: does this place welcome my cat or dog, under what conditions, and what will it cost? I shaped the product around clearer information for pet parents and a more concrete way for hotels to communicate what they can accommodate.

A typical hotel-search pattern reduces pet policy to a checkbox and a badge. These simplified before-and-after comparisons show why I designed the live experience differently.

As PawsVerified's AI Product Manager, I owned the product end to end — from framing the problem to designing and shipping the experience. The first available tool is an AI hotel verifier. Travelers search by city or hotel name, choose whether they are looking for cats, dogs, or both, and inspect individual reports rather than relying on a generic pet-friendly badge. The search supports a United States focus and an early worldwide view; a saved-places list helps people keep track of possibilities.

• →City or hotel search → find properties and open a report for each one
• →Cats and dogs → assess each species separately instead of treating ‘pet’ as one policy
• →Published policies and reviews → put rules, fees, and corroborating context together
• →Saved places → hold onto hotels worth considering while comparing options

The hotel report makes the evidence inspectable. It shows when the AI last checked a property, separates dog and cat assessments, surfaces published fee and restriction details, and distinguishes what a hotel or review claims from what has actually been confirmed. Transparency, confidence, and facility indicators are accompanied by explanations rather than standing alone as scores.

My product design work centered on one question: how do you present an AI's judgment so people can trust it without over-trusting it? The report shows when the AI last checked, pairs transparency, confidence, and facility indicators with explanations, and links review snapshots to their sources. Those choices let travelers inspect the reasoning instead of taking a number at face value.

The same honesty shaped the edge of the product. Saved places stay on the traveler's device, the tool describes itself plainly as an AI hotel verifier, and the disclaimer — that reports are generated from public information and should be confirmed with the hotel — is part of the design, not small print buried at the bottom. A ‘verified with us’ view keeps returning visitors oriented on which properties have already been checked.

PawsVerified is an ongoing project, and improvements ship along the way rather than waiting for a single launch. The next milestone is a curated, manually verified directory: a separate layer that checks pet policies directly with hotels and makes the difference between AI-assisted findings and human verification visible to travelers. The AI verifier and its hotel reports are the experience available today, and they keep getting sharper.