Our methodology
How we collect, validate, and display cattery data — and what we will not publish.
Licensing data
All licensing information comes from UK local authority animal activity licensing registers, published under Schedule 3 of the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) Regulations 2018. We fetch these registers directly from council websites on a rolling basis.
We display: licence number, trading name, star rating, licensing authority, and expiry date. We do not display full premises addresses — town and outward postcode only.
Price data
Prices are observed from operator websites using an automated crawler. We use a three-stage cascade:
- Schema.org structured data — the most reliable source when operators use a CMS (Squarespace, Wix, etc.) that emits pricing markup.
- Pattern matching — regex patterns covering common cattery price formats ("from £X/night", "family pen £X", etc.).
- AI extraction — a language model reads the page text and extracts structured price data when the first two methods cannot find a price.
All extracted prices are validated against published ranges (£6–£60/night standard pen; £10–£90/night family pen). Out-of-range values are flagged for human review before publication.
Publishability gates
An operator is only listed on this site if they meet all of the following:
- Licence verified in the last 120 days.
- Activity confirmed to include cat boarding (not dog-only).
- Location resolved to at least town level.
- No unresolved high-severity data conflict on record.
- Publishability score ≥ 60 / 100.
Operators that do not meet these gates are stored in our database for continuity but are never shown on public pages.
What we do not cover
- Pet sitting / cat sitting — where someone visits or stays in the owner's home. This is a different service with different licensing requirements (or none).
- Unlicensed operators — we do not list cattery-style operations that do not hold a current AAL licence.
- Dog-only operators — stored for entity continuity but never shown in cat-facing routes.
Update cadence
Licence data is refreshed on a rolling basis as councils publish updates. Price data is re-observed roughly every 90 days, with additional crawls triggered by significant price changes. Our national price index uses observations from the last 90 days only.