Open Data for Finding Pet-Friendly Places in Europe
Most travelers with pets rely on word of mouth or review sites to find places that welcome animals. But several European countries publish structured tourism data that includes pet policies. These datasets are freely available and remarkably detailed.
DATAtourisme in France
France operates DATAtourisme, a national open data platform aggregating tourism information from every region. The dataset contains hundreds of thousands of points of interest with structured fields for accessibility, including pet acceptance. The data is published as RDF and CSV, updated regularly by local tourism offices.
Parsing the CSV export reveals that roughly 40 percent of listed accommodations explicitly mention pet policies. Some entries specify size restrictions, deposits, or the number of animals allowed. The granularity varies by region — Brittany and Provence have the most detailed entries.
Other European Sources
Germany publishes tourism data through individual Lander portals. The quality is inconsistent but improving. The Netherlands has a centralized NBTC dataset. Spain has datos.gob.es with tourism categories, though pet fields are sparse.
Switzerland deserves special mention. MySwitzerland publishes a curated dataset of dog-friendly hotels, hiking trails, and restaurants. The Swiss are thorough, as expected. For further reading, have a look at dog-friendly travel spots in France.
Building a Personal Database
I wrote a set of Python scripts to pull these sources into a unified SQLite schema. Each place gets normalized fields: name, coordinates, category, pet_allowed (boolean), pet_conditions (text), pet_size_limit (enum), and source attribution. The whole thing runs as a cron job once a week.
The database currently holds about 180,000 places across France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. I query it before every trip. A simple command-line tool filters by region, category, and dog size.
Limitations
Open data is only as good as its maintenance. Some entries are years old. Hotels change ownership and policies. I cross-validate with recent reviews when possible, but there is always a lag. Still, it beats scrolling through forum posts from 2016.
If you are building something similar, start with DATAtourisme. The documentation is decent and the community is active. For Germany, expect to write custom parsers per Land.