It's Thursday morning, mid-May. You just took a deposit for a four-night Memorial Day stay over the phone, hung up, and realized that's the third time today someone has called asking about the weekend. Your calendar app is open. Most of your runs are spoken for. A few are tentative because someone hasn't sent their updated rabies certificate back yet. You haven't actually confirmed your weekend staff schedule. And your part-timer who said she'd "probably" be around for the long weekend — you haven't heard from her in eight days.

Memorial Day weekend is eleven days away. The drop-offs start the morning of Friday the 22nd, which means the bookings, the records, the staffing, the supply runs, the customer-communication, all of it has to be locked in by next Wednesday at the latest.

Here's the thing about the Memorial Day weekend specifically: it isn't the biggest weekend of your year. The Fourth of July is bigger. Christmas through New Year's is bigger. Thanksgiving is bigger. But Memorial Day is the one that sets the tone. It's the first real test of your summer systems, and how it goes determines whether the next three months feel like a controlled rhythm or a slow-motion fire drill.

The work that decides how it goes is happening this week. Here's the playbook.

Lock Down Your Capacity (And Stop Saying "Maybe")

Open your calendar right now and look at the weekend of May 22–26. For every run, you should be able to say one of three things: confirmed booking with a deposit on file, confirmed booking with no deposit yet, or open. There should be no fourth category.

If you have runs in "tentative" status because someone said they "might" need it, today is the day to convert those. Call them. Text them if calling feels heavy. Tell them honestly: "Hey, I'm finalizing my Memorial Day schedule today and I have one tentative hold for you. Can you confirm the dates, or should I open the run back up?" The people who were serious will confirm. The people who were noodling will release it, and you'll get the run back into your real inventory while there's still time to fill it.

The kennels that get into trouble over a holiday weekend almost always have the same problem: they were carrying soft holds that didn't materialize, and by the time they figured it out, the people who would have happily taken the runs had booked somewhere else.

If you've been running an informal "first-come, first-served, sort it out at the door" approach to weekend bookings, this is also the week to fix that for the rest of the summer. Decide what you require to hold a run — a deposit, a credit card on file, a signed confirmation, whatever fits your operation — and apply it consistently for the holiday weekends ahead. Memorial Day is a low-stakes weekend to start enforcing a policy. By Fourth of July, you want it to feel normal.

Audit Your Records Before Drop-Off Friday

Pull up the list of every pet booked for the weekend. For each one, you need three things squared away before they walk in: current vaccinations on file, complete feeding and medication instructions, and updated emergency contact info.

Vaccination records are the one that bites the hardest. The owners who scramble to email a rabies certificate at 4 PM the day before drop-off are not the ones who cause problems — those people are at least trying. The ones who cause problems are the regulars who haven't been in since February, whose paperwork was current then and isn't now, and who don't realize anything has lapsed.

Right now, go through every weekend booking and flag any pet whose vaccinations expire before May 26. Send those owners a single message today: "Hey, your dog's bordetella is up for renewal — can you swing by the vet this week and send me the updated certificate? Just don't want any surprises at drop-off." That single sentence sent on a Thursday saves you a tense conversation on a Friday afternoon eleven days from now.

Same logic on feeding instructions. If you're working from notes a regular client gave you six months ago, confirm. Dogs change diets. A casual text — "Want to confirm Bella is still on the salmon kibble, half-cup twice a day?" — takes thirty seconds and prevents the kind of mistake nobody loves explaining at pickup.

Sort Your Staff Coverage Before the Weekend

This one is more important than most owners admit out loud. By the end of this week, you should have a printed (or at least sent-and-confirmed) staff schedule covering Friday May 22 through Tuesday May 26, with names on every shift and a backup name for every shift.

Why backups? Because Memorial Day weekend in mid-to-late May is when one of your staff inevitably gets a last-minute family invitation, or a college-age helper realizes finals are actually that week, or someone catches a stomach bug. If you haven't pre-identified who you'd call, you'll be calling everyone you know on Friday morning. Build that bench now.

If you're hiring summer help and haven't pulled the trigger yet, you are running out of time. The labor pool for part-time kennel work in 2026 is tight. Pay rates in most markets land somewhere between $12 and $18 an hour for entry-level kennel techs, and the candidates worth keeping have multiple options. If you've been telling yourself you'll figure it out after Memorial Day, you'll spend Fourth of July weekend wishing you hadn't. Post one more time this week. Offer a small holiday-weekend bonus to anyone who covers the full long weekend without dropping a shift. Cheap insurance.

Communicate With Clients Before They Ask

The customers who are already booked for the weekend are about to have questions. They're going to wonder what time they can drop off Friday, what time pickup is on Monday or Tuesday, whether you're closed at any point during the weekend, what to bring, whether you need anything from them in advance.

Do not wait for them to ask. Send them a short, friendly note this week confirming the basics: their dates, their pet's name, drop-off window, pickup window, what to bring, any vaccination items you need, and the best number to reach you over the weekend. A single message sent to everyone on the booking list takes you maybe an hour to set up and saves you twenty individual phone calls between now and next Friday.

It's also the moment to set expectations on photos and updates. If you do report cards or send photos during long stays, tell them what to expect — "I'll send you a couple of pics over the weekend, usually Saturday and Sunday afternoons." If you don't, tell them how to reach you for an update if they want one. Either way, you've replaced the ambiguity that makes pet parents anxious with a clear picture of what their weekend is going to look like.

This is also the lowest-cost goodwill move available to you. Pet parents who feel informed before they hand over the leash come back. Pet parents who feel like they had to chase you for basic information shop around next time.

Build the Buffers (Food, Cleaning, Cash, Coffee)

The last 72 hours before a holiday weekend at a boarding kennel are not the time to discover you're out of paper towels, low on bleach, missing the bag of grain-free kibble three of your boarders need, or short on the cash you need in the till for any walk-up business.

Take an hour this week and do a supply run. Specifically: cleaning supplies (you'll go through more than usual), poop bags, paper towels, food storage bags for the boarders bringing their own kibble, any treats you provide, and a small backup of plain kibble for the inevitable owner who forgets to send food. Pay attention to anything boarding-specific — flea/tick wipes if you use them, ear-cleaning supplies for the long-stay dogs, the medication storage system if you've been winging it.

Walk through your facility this week as if you were a brand-new customer dropping off for the first time. Is the front desk area clean? Are signs current? Is your hours posting accurate? Is there anywhere a stressed-out pet parent walks in and thinks "this is fine but it's a little chaotic"? Memorial Day brings first-time clients alongside your regulars — for many of them, this is the weekend they decide whether you're their new kennel or just the place that happened to have availability.

Decide What You're Not Doing This Weekend

Here is the move most kennel owners skip, and it's the one that separates a good weekend from a survivable one: decide in advance what you are explicitly not going to handle this weekend.

You're not training a new staff member starting May 22. You're not running a deep-clean project. You're not breaking ground on the new grooming room. You're not switching food vendors mid-weekend. You're not introducing a new intake form or changing pricing or rolling out a software feature. The week before a long-weekend rush is not the week to start anything new. It's the week to make everything that's already running, run well.

Write down your "not this weekend" list and put it somewhere you can see it. Every time you're tempted to slip something extra into the weekend, look at the list. The reward for restraint is a holiday weekend where nothing surprising happens — and "nothing surprising happened" is the gold standard for peak weekends at a kennel.

How Goodstay Fits

Most of what's on this checklist isn't really about software. It's about discipline — making decisions on Thursday so you don't have to make them on Sunday. But a lot of the friction that turns a controlled weekend into a chaotic one comes from data being scattered across spreadsheets, paper folders, sticky notes, and the inside of your head.

Goodstay was built for the indie kennel owner running 8 to 40 runs who needs that data in one place — without paying enterprise pricing or sitting through a sales demo to find out what the platform does. Real-time availability so you can see at a glance which runs are still open for the weekend. Vaccination tracking that flags expiring records before drop-off, not at the door. Per-pet feeding and medication schedules your weekend staff can see on their phone. Automated owner communication so the "what time can I drop off?" texts get answered before they're sent. Online booking and deposit collection so the conversion from tentative to confirmed isn't a phone-tag situation. Clean digital invoicing for when the weekend's done and pickups are stacking up.

It starts at $29 a month. No contracts. No setup fees. No hour-long demo before you can see the product. You sign up, and you start using it.

If your Memorial Day prep is already showing the cracks that turn into bigger problems by Fourth of July, take a look at what Goodstay does for independent kennels. The summer's just getting started — there's still time to make the rest of it run a lot smoother than it usually does.