Airplane menus these days can offer a wide range of drink options. But it’s rare to see water offered in permutations that include still, sparkling and toilet.
Then again, it’s rare to see a window decal warning to keep tongues inside the aircraft.
Such is life on BARK Air, the country’s self-proclaimed first dog airline, and a service which I found myself using one day earlier this fall.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single traveler in possession of a good dog must be in want of doing anything but flying. After years of letting in-cabin dogs slide by with the “emotional support” tag, most airlines these days don’t allow pups at your seat unless they can contort themselves into a carrier the size of a sandwich bag. For everyone else there’s the luggage hold. Most dog owners would sooner cut off a toe.
BARK Air had a different idea. The service launched in the spring with a specific appeal to Hollywood, as The Hollywood Reporter‘s Christy Pina wrote at the time. (Josh Groban has hopped aboard, among others.) It has only ratcheted up since, supplementing New York.-Los Angeles flights with jaunts to London and Paris. As I was relocating recently from New York to Los Angeles — a common condition for Hollywood workers — I decided to try it for myself and my two pups.
Arriving at Teterboro, a lounge filled with treats and happy attendants awaited, easing the walk out on the tarmac, where selfies broke out in front of the plane. The pilot stood nearby. “Is the barking onboard bad or have you heard worse from humans?” I asked.
“Much worse,” he said.
Aboard the Gulfstream, some half-dozen dogs and the humans they reluctantly agreed to let come along settled in. Dogs had their own boarding passes and passports; people names were after-thoughtedly included.
As the craft aircraft climbed over western New Jersey on to Pennsylvania, a menu appeared. “Barkaccino” anchored the dessert choices; doggie “Chompagne” topped the beverage list. (“With hints of tennis ball and freshly mown grass.”) The flight attendant — a longtime owner of a dog spa in Brooklyn clearly versed in dog-handling — began making a show of delivering the treats, on the kind of silver platter seen in old Tom and Jerry Cartoons. Some come to Hollywood with a script and a dream. Others just need a Milk-Bone.
The experience felt like equal parts doggy-day care, theater performance and godsend for stressed-out pet parent. No worries about weight restrictions or crate dimensions here — just a whole group of people with the same love of dogs and the same feeling of relief.
Most stressful for dog owners is not knowing how a pup will react up there. So before the flight, a customer-service liaison jumped on a Zoom to ascertain dog preferences. Are they stressful travelers? What relaxes them in car rides? Will they socialize or hang back? Something about the session becalmed me, like a therapist had simultaneously guessed my worst anxiety and then offered a treatment to boot.
To ease the dogs’ anxieties, there were pheromone mists and swaddling ThunderShirts and even a soothing bone broth. Humans use the Calm app; pups go a different route.
“Not to knock traditional airlines, but flying these days is a pretty stressful experience for a lot of dog owners,” said Dave Stangle, BARK’s brand marketing manager, when I asked him later about the company’s approach. “So we thought we’d go the opposite way and supercharge it so that we care about your dog even more than you.”
BarkBox has been around since 2011 and went public as BARK nearly four years ago. (Perhaps you’ve encountered their subscription dog-product boxes.) The decision to launch an airline, Stangle told me, came from the same impulse as the product division: to fill gaps in the pet-care business and make life easier for pet parents. Most of the weekly $6,000 cross-continent flights have sold out; when you factor in ticket and pet fees (and Xanax prescriptions), the cost doesn’t vastly outpace the price of a first-class commercial ticket.
Performance took a prominent role on-board — dog selfies with the pilot (don’t worry, no pawing at the controls); a spa treatment for interested pups. Not one for the human sort, I nonetheless considered the pet version. If you’re not going to opt for a facial on a wet nose in a metal tube above Indiana, when would you consider it?
More courses broke out, for both humans and canines. The flight attendant made sure to present the bottle to the dog for approval first; four-legged patrons deserve sommeliers too. (The Chompagne was a chicken-based liquid delicacy. I hope.) By the time we passed over Nevada, the whole thing felt less like a flight and more like a dog vacation that happens to get you somewhere.
As light-hearted as the experience was, though, it also hinted at the future of aviation, what with air taxis from the likes of Joby-Uber, “semi-private” airlines like JSX and BARK Air offering a more bespoke and less hassle-y experience. These companies are betting that enough people will be willing to shell out a few extra dollars to avoid the goat-herdy hebetude that modern commercial aviation has become. In BARK Air’s case, the service seems particularly relevant as the holiday travel season approaches and leaving pets behind often isn’t an option.
While the dogs onboard were incredibly well-behaved — barely a bark or a whimper among them — you never really forgot this was a canine-themed experience. To wit: That window sign, which also urged that heads and noses stay inside. The wifi code, of course, was the plane’s tail number.
(The windows don’t open. To the dogs’ chagrin.)
As we prepared for landing into Van Nuys, the pilot got on the mic to inform us of weather conditions and thank us for flying with BARK. Outside, the plane aimed its nose downward. On board, many of the passengers did the same.
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