City Bark Parker — Local services in Parker

Let me start by saying, I have no idea how City Bark Parker is in business, other than the fact it was once an outstanding business and the fact they provide little detail on their website regarding the services they’re providing. Other reviews mention a change in ownership has brought the place down, although I cannot confirm the ownership detail.

We started using City Bark Parker about 5 years ago and our dogs loved to go. Our dogs are easy going and love to play with other dogs. Over the last year or so, our dogs began refusing to get out of the car as we were dropping them off. This behavior led me to begin trying to understand what had changed.

Since the pandemic began, they do not allow customers inside the establishment, but do have cameras that occasionally work in the playrooms and outside areas, not the kennels though, which is where our dogs mainly stay. During our last few trips, the cameras have been functional, so I began looking for our dogs and found it was very rare to see them out, which was strange since we were paying for “full day daycare”. There were several dogs packed in tiny rooms being constantly sprayed with water bottles, but not ours.

I called and spoke to one of the workers who informed me, “Full day daycare is from 10-4pm with 2 additional 30-minute potty breaks outside of that window.” During a previous visit, I called to inquire why I could not locate our dogs and a worker mentioned our dogs may be at nap to allow the employees to have a lunch break. Obviously, this is before I knew they only had 6 hours to play in the first place, or we would have cut ties with City Bark at that time. So, I emailed to ask if the full day daycare might be less that 6 hours to accommodate lunches and the young woman informed me that could be the case and it was confirmed to be true.

At this point I’m thinking, who would ever bring their dogs to City Bark if they knew this information and began looking for service descriptions on their website. The only mention of any time I could find states “Half-Day Play offers up to 5 hours of play for your furry family member.” Now I’m even more confused since full day is best case, 6 hours.

I’m now furious and advised my wife it may be best if she retrieves the dogs. She does and asked out of curiosity what the half day dogs receive if we only receive 6? She was advised half day dogs get 7-1pm, which is no different than full day. Furthermore, since lunch overlaps, they are likely to not receive their full play time either. We simply advised we’ll never be back.

Starting this trip City Bark also changed up their billing and provides a “Receipt for Appointment” which, come to find out, is a detailed invoice of the services they are expecting to provide and finalized when we retrieve the dogs. Since I typically handle the pickup and drop-off, my wife was not all that familiar with billing and assumed a card was on file and heard “we’ll charge your card on file” and left. It was an innocent mistake when you’re trying to handle 2 crazy dogs who are excited to see her after being in a kennel ~18-20 hours a day, for 9 days. Instead of contacting us, they called the Douglas County Sheriff’s office. This did not really change the review as I was planning to post regardless, but some nice icing on top.

One other thing to note about City Bark, while they have a curbside drop off and pickup, it’s rare for the worker to greet you to be wearing a mask. So, you may want to seek alternative options if you’re planning to see your loved ones.

Whether you love or hate this place, I would imagine anyone who continues to use their services would enjoy knowing what they’re receiving since, as far as I can tell, it’s nowhere to be found on their site and likely very different than you may have received in the past if you’ve been a patron for any length of time.

Owner response is far from what I was told, which was very easy to understand and in line with my review. Zero mention of anything additional in the owner rebuttal. Nicole you're welcome to reach...

We were pretty disappointed with our experience at City Bark. We boarded our dog Charlie for five days over Thanksgiving weekend.

1. Of course, to board your dog they need to meet him/her and see how well they're socialized. However, their online system allows you to book a time they're not actually available. We were able to book a time over the phone after they reached out to us. Not a huge deal, but a yellow flag in hindsight. The session where they met Charlie was quick and easy.

2. I like the idea of their pre-check-in. However, the system is pretty poorly designed and there are no descriptions of any add-ons you might purchase. So, I bailed on this, deciding to add things on at the time we checked Charlie in.

3. Their responses to text messages and voicemails were extremely hit or miss. This was true before we checked Charlie in, but as we started running into issues during the stay it was clear the staff was avoiding communicating with us.

4. The place smells OVERWHELMINGLY like dog urine. The smell hits you in the face as soon as you walk in the front door. Huge red flag in hindsight, but this was our first time boarding so we weren't sure if this was a huge deal or not at the time.

5. We signed Charlie up for the Gold play package, for each day of boarding. However, even when we checked in the staff didn't do a great job of setting expectations of how long he'd be socializing with other dogs, or how structured/unstructured the time would be. After we checked him in, they just took him to the back and didn't have any other information for us.

6. The staff promised to email us a link to the app and cameras after check-in. This didn't happen; I had to text them to get the link.

7. Even after texting them, they completely forgot to get Charlie out of his room the first morning after his initial night there. It wasn't until I called, irate, that they let him out. I don't understand how a boarding place can straight up forget about your dog.

8. The play time seemed to be extremely unstructured. It was just a bunch of dogs hanging out, whenever we happened to check the cameras. Dogs were constantly peeing on the floor in the play area instead of being taken outside, which probably contributes to the smell in the place.

9. Because of our bad experience on the first day, we felt like we had to almost constantly monitor the cameras to make sure our dog wasn't forgotten. This was not ideal, to say the least, while we were on a trip.

10. Charlie was in his room for almost 24 hours straight on Thanksgiving. No one showed up to let any of the dogs out until late in the afternoon Thanksgiving day. I left a pretty irate voicemail which was, again, ignored by the teenage staff.

11. We added on for Charlie to have a bath before we picked him up. The bath didn't happen; he smelled awful and urine was visible in various spots all over his body. Our car still smells like dog pee.

12. We never received a picture or written update about Charlie. We were supposed to get both, daily, as part of the package we paid for.

13. To the teenage staff's credit, they immediately offered me a 50% refund of the boarding charges when I started to mention how poorly things had gone. But they didn't want to discuss it further. Again, it would have been nice to see an adult employee, manager, or owner at any point during this experience. It was clear the staff was really uncomfortable with the whole situation given that they started ignoring our calls, texts, and emails starting mid-week. But ignoring the situation doesn't make it better, guys.

14. We immediately canceled two other boarding appointments for this month. We'll have to find something else, but anything would be better than subjecting our dog to that experience again.

Overall: I wish we'd read the more recent reviews of City Bark, which are more negative (and seemingly accurate) than older ones. I would not recommend anyone board their dog at City Bark Parker until or unless they make major...

Currently my family and I are out in North Carolina. My dogs have stayed here since the 24th. At first, my dogs were given a lot of attention and allowed to play throughout the day. But yesterday (the 26th) and today, they have barely been let out. We have watched the cameras constantly just to see our two dogs locked in a room barking. We even reached out and were told that "they should've been let out and we're sending someone to let them out and play". It's been around 30 minutes and they're still stuck. We are paying the highest rate to make sure our dogs get the care and attention they deserve, yet this doesn't seem like gold treatment. We also paid for the luxury suite but there's 1 bed for our dogs, and no patio to go outside. The wording does say large luxury suite or patio suite, but it's still disappointing to see no way for them to go out. Our dogs should have all day play, because we paid for such. I rated 2 stars because my animals were having fun, but now they are stuck in a small room. We never vacation because we have pets, and are considering coming home early because of this inconvenience. It took two calls to get them in a play room with other dogs. I understand being short staffed, but that shouldn't change the benefits we are paying for. It's hard enough leaving our rescue animals at a boarding place, so seeing them in a small room with nothing to do is awful. I appreciate the staff's kindness on the phone, but this isn't what we paid for. Edit - In the end, the boarding went well. My dogs really enjoyed all of the play time, and were shown more attention after speaking up. We ended up upgrading the platinum for both our dogs and cats, and were happy with how the rest of the boarding went. The holidays are busy so I understand the trouble of getting all the dogs to play. My dogs were so worn out after coming home, but clearly enjoyed their time. Plus, they smelt amazing when we got them home. Though my cats weren't as happy being boarded, we'll look into doing it again for...