3 Tips for Preparing Your Pet for Travel

Whether your pet is flying across the country or across the world, a little preparation goes a long way toward a calm, uneventful trip. Out of everything we walk clients through before a move, these three tips make the biggest difference in how well a pet handles travel day.

1. Crate Train Well Before Travel Day

A carrier should feel like a safe, familiar space long before it becomes the place your pet spends a flight. Start weeks in advance: leave the crate open in a room your pet already likes, add a blanket or piece of clothing that smells like home, and drop treats inside so walking in becomes a positive habit rather than something forced. Feed meals near or inside the crate, and gradually work up to short periods with the door closed while you’re in the room.

Once your pet is comfortable resting in the crate, practice short trips — a walk around the block in the carrier, a quick car ride — to build tolerance for movement and unfamiliar sounds. Pets that associate their crate with stress are far more likely to pace, whine, or try to escape mid-transit, which can make an otherwise routine trip much harder on everyone. A well-crate-trained pet, by contrast, often settles in and sleeps through most of the journey.

2. Get a Pre-Travel Health Screening

Beyond the vaccination and health certificate paperwork required for travel, it’s worth having your vet run a broader wellness check a few days before departure — ideally a complete blood count (CBC) and blood chemistry panel. A CBC looks at red and white blood cell levels to flag anemia, infection, or inflammation, while a chemistry panel checks how organs like the kidneys and liver are functioning. Neither test is usually required by an airline or import authority, but both give you a real picture of how your pet is likely to handle the stress of travel.

This matters most for senior pets, breeds prone to heart or respiratory issues, and any pet with a known chronic condition — but it’s a smart precaution for a healthy young pet too, since some issues don’t show obvious symptoms until they’re triggered by stress. Timing it a couple of days before your flight gives you enough of a window to act on anything unexpected without derailing your travel plans, and it gives your vet a chance to advise on anything that needs monitoring in transit.

3. Reduce Food Intake Before the Trip

A full stomach and travel stress don’t mix well. Motion, unfamiliar noise, and the general anxiety of being crated can easily trigger nausea, vomiting, or an upset stomach — and a mess in a carrier mid-flight is uncomfortable for your pet and genuinely stressful to clean up on arrival. Most vets recommend a light meal, or none at all, in the 4 to 6 hours before departure, with water still freely available unless your vet advises otherwise.

“Reduced” is the operative word, though — this isn’t about withholding food entirely for long stretches, and pets with diabetes or other conditions requiring regular feeding need a plan from their vet rather than a blanket rule. For longer international trips with layovers or extended transit time, talk to your vet about how to balance an empty stomach at boarding with your pet’s actual nutritional needs over the full journey.

Planning a move with a pet? PetTransPRO can walk you through crate training timelines, pre-travel vet visits, and feeding schedules alongside the rest of your pet’s travel documentation, so nothing gets left to the last minute. Get in touch and we’ll help you build a prep plan for your pet’s trip.