Communication on Drive Night and When Your Dog is at Camp

Hello and thank you for sending your dog to camp. This email is about communication during pick up and delivery with our free city van and checking for updates on your dog when you’re away.

The short version: 1) Please help delivery by not changing your plans at the last minute. 2) Please be ready when we pull up. 3) Text, not voice, is the best way to communicate on drive nights. 4) Try not to send stuff with the dog. 5) To check on your dog, please first scroll through the pictures and videos on the blog.

We try to do all deliveries between 5:30 PM and 10 PM and send out ETAs the morning before the van heads off to the city. Please find someone with a text-enabled phone to be in a comfortable spot ready to wait for the van. Please communicate by text when drivers are on the road. You will get a quicker response to text than a voice call or email during an active route

This is a sidewalk service at the location of your choice, so please find a person who can bring a dog or a leash to accept a dog when they get an “I’m here” text from the driver. Get your plan ready before we send out the ETAs. You can update your reservation with the address where you’d like us to go if that is not your residence. We haven’t had great results with doormen. We send a “next stop” text that should let you know we’re almost there.

Anything you can do to get to the van quickly and help us move on to the next stop is appreciated. Waiting for customers who aren’t ready despite a couple of “heads up” before we get there is the primary cause of late van service, not traffic.

Please give us as a few possessions as you can. Please consider not sending special food with your dog, as we have high-quality food here and customer-provided food may reduce your dog’s playtime. We prefer you not to feed your dog before going on a trip.

Please figure out your plan for pick up and drop off 24 hours in advance and if at all possible avoid last-minute changes. The AI route planning software works well, but a single apparently small change can re-route the entire trip, and mess up someone else’s plans on the route down the line.

When you’re away, we will send updates by email first, as we don’t know what time zone customers may be in and try to avoid text. But we will likely have new galleries and videos uploaded that you can check before you get an email. We are doing galleries by the day (look at the blog on glencadia.com for examples) and upload edited videos to YouTube as well from time to time, less frequently. Facebook and Instagram also are places to check but before you assume there is no picture of your dog because you didn’t see him or her on social media, check the galleries and videos on the blog/website.

Keeping everyone informed can be a challenge on our end but we’re getting better. Our goal is to send frequent updates by email, keep the blog humming with photos, and weigh the dogs frequently and send videos with their weight so you can let us know if they are losing (and less frequently gaining) weight. If you are a customer who doesn’t need a ton of pictures of your dog, you can ignore our messages. Most people seem to dig seeing what the furbaby is doing with his/her pack mates. Try scrolling through the pictures before we push some notices back your way.

Thank you for sending your dog to camp. Working together to smooth the van deliveries and communication about dog updates we hopefully can provide a fun and useful service to our great New York dog families.

Thank you,

Glencadia Dog Camp

If you need to get in touch with us after we chat here, this is our complete array of people and communication methods:

Glencadia Dog Camp
Will, Owner
will@glencadia.com
Patricia, Administration
patricia@glencadia.com
tel 518-294-4343
text 518-333-9202
3 Rybka Road
PO Box 40
Stuyvesant Falls NY 12174
http://glencadia.com
972F+XP Stuyvesant Falls, Stuyvesant, NY