A founder letter from Franchesca Butler, CEO and Co-Founder
I want to tell you about the worst twelve hours of Jelly's life. And mine.
It was a summer a few years ago. My parents live in Spain and I'd been making the trip down from London to see them every bi-annually since Covid. Flights were obvious when I was travelling alone. But then Jelly arrived, a tiny cream toy poodle with the energy of a much larger dog and an absolute conviction that wherever I was going, she was coming too.
She wasn't wrong. Non-negotiable from day one.
So the flights stopped, and the planning started. Getting to Spain with a dog from the UK is not, it turns out, a simple problem. There's the ferry from Portsmouth if you're driving, but I didn't own a car. There's the option of a pet-friendly courier, but I didn't know how to find one I could trust. And then there are the carpools — the shared-ride services where you jump in with other travellers heading south, split the fuel costs, and make a long journey feel a bit more like an adventure.
Which is how Jelly and I ended up stuck at a French border crossing for twelve hours because someone else in the car had a fake passport.
I want to be clear: I had done everything right. Jelly had her documentation. EU Pet Passport, freshly stamped with her worming treatment 2 days before. Microchip verified. Rabies vaccination current. I had a folder — an actual physical folder — with everything organised, tabbed, and ready to present. Because that's what you do when you travel with a pet and you've read every forum post and government guidance page and are quietly terrified of getting it wrong.
What I had not done — what nobody could have done — was check whether the person sitting in the front passenger seat of the car had a valid passport. That was not, I had reasonably assumed, my responsibility.
It was not a quick resolution.
Border officials pulled the car over. Documents were checked. Then checked again. Then we were asked to pull into a side area and wait. Jelly, who had been a model traveller on the flight from Spain to France, overnight in Paris and for the first four hours of the car journey, was now a very small dog in a very warm carrier in a stationary car, confused about why we had stopped somewhere that was neither home nor Spain.
We waited. And waited. An official came back with more questions. Someone made a phone call. Another official arrived. More waiting.
Twelve hours, in the end. Twelve hours at a French border crossing in summer, trying to keep Jelly calm, trying to keep myself calm, unsure whether we would actually be allowed to continue onto the ferry home to the UK or whether we'd be turned back to France with nowhere to go, unsure who to call or what our rights were or whether Jelly's documentation — which was perfect, which I had checked four times — would somehow be called into question by association with the chaos unfolding around us.
We were eventually waved through but the other passenger was not, nor was our driver. However, we couldn't board the ferry as a foot passenger. Stuck again at 2am.
The detention centre had a slow selection of passers through at this time in the morning and by luck, a crowd of people shuffled through. Their van had 1 free seat and alas another half day later, Jelly and I arrived back in East London, with just a few years shaved off my life.
Jelly slept for most of the journey. I did not sleep, I started writing things down.
Not about the fake passport. About the other twelve hours — the hours before we reached the border, when I'd been managing the usual low-grade anxiety of travelling with a pet. Whether the carpool driver knew there was a dog coming and was actually okay with it. Whether the carrier dimensions I'd measured at home would seem different in the tight back seat of someone else's car. Whether the documentation I'd prepared was the right documentation, in the right format, for a ferry crossing rather than a road crossing. Whether any of this would be easier if there were somewhere — one place — that just had the right answer, for your specific animal, on your specific route, with your specific situation.
There wasn't. And I'd been wishing there was for years.
By the time I met Dilara, I'd been travelling between London and Spain with Jelly for long enough that I'd built what I privately called The Document. It was a spreadsheet. An extensive, colour-coded, deeply personal spreadsheet that had started as a simple checklist and evolved, over many trips and several near-misses and one twelve-hour border crossing, into something considerably more elaborate.
It had columns for airlines and their cabin pet weight limits. Tabs for ferry operators and which routes allowed dogs as foot passengers. A section on documentation requirements by country — because crossing from France into Spain has different requirements than crossing from the UK into France, and both of those are different again if you're coming back the other way. Notes on which carpooling platforms let you filter for pet-friendly drivers. A running list of things to double-check, titled, in a moment of dramatic exhaustion, "THINGS THAT COULD GO WRONG."
I sent versions of it to friends who were trying to travel with their animals. They responded with gratitude and overwhelm in roughly equal measure. Because the information was useful — but the fact that the information existed only in a hand-built spreadsheet maintained by one person, rather than in any kind of organised, accessible, trustworthy platform, said everything about the state of pet travel infrastructure.
People were navigating one of the most logistically complex things you can do — moving an animal across borders, on public transport, with time-sensitive documentation — using word of mouth, outdated blog posts, and each other's homemade spreadsheets.
There had to be something better. I just didn't know how to build it.
I met Dilara because a mutual friend thought we should talk.
He didn't give us much context beyond that — just a message that said, essentially, you two should meet, I think you'll find it interesting. Which is the kind of vague matchmaking that you agree to out of politeness and then reschedule twice before eventually following through.
We followed through on a Tuesday evening at a pub in Hackney. I brought Jelly, because Jelly goes where I go, and because I've found that showing up somewhere with a small poodle in a carrier is quite an effective icebreaker.
Dilara had been watching the pet travel market from the outside — as a technologist who had a habit of noticing gaps. And what she'd noticed was that the demand side and the supply side of pet travel existed in near-total disconnection from each other. Pet owners were desperately trying to find services they could trust. Businesses — couriers, van operators, specialist relocation companies — were offering those services without any real infrastructure for reaching the people who needed them. The marketplace existed in theory. In practice, it was invisible.
She had started building. An app. The beginnings of something that could bring the two sides together — that could let pet owners search by the variables that actually mattered, and let verified providers be found by the people who needed them.
What she hadn't had, yet, was someone who'd lived the problem from the inside.
I put Jelly on the pub table — she is small enough to get away with this; we have tested the limits of many establishments — and I started talking. About the ferry bookings and the health certificates and the carrier weight limits that varied by airline. About the carpool from London and the fake passport and the twelve hours at the French border in July. About The Document, and everything in it, and the fundamental absurdity of the fact that this was still how people were navigating pet travel in the twenty-first century.
Dilara listened. And then she said something that I think about often:
"You've been building this in a spreadsheet. We should build it properly."
We stayed at that pub for four hours. Jelly fell asleep on the table. We ordered food and then ignored it while we talked, and by the time we left, the shape of something real had formed between us. Not a business plan, exactly. Not a pitch. Just a shared, clear-eyed understanding of the problem — and a growing conviction that we were, between the two of us, actually equipped to solve it.
Dilara had the technical architecture and the market insight. I had years of lived experience, a deeply annotated spreadsheet, and a very strong personal motivation in the form of a small cream toy poodle who needed to get to Spain at least once a year without either of us having a breakdown.
We decided to build Get Pet Go together. And we went back and completely redefined what it needed to be.
The original concept Dilara had been developing was a solid foundation. But the conversation in Hackney pushed it further. Because what I knew, from years of being the person on the other side of this problem, is that a marketplace alone isn't enough.
Pet travel isn't like booking a taxi or a hotel room. The stakes are higher. The variables are more complex. The consequences of getting it wrong — a pet stuck at a border, a health certificate that's expired by one day, a courier who doesn't actually have the right equipment for your dog's size, an airline that turns you away at the gate — are genuinely serious. Pet owners don't just need options. They need confidence. They need to know that the information they're acting on is current, that the provider they're booking is actually equipped for what they need, and that if something unexpected happens, there's somewhere to turn.
That's what we set out to build: not just a directory of pet transport services, but a proper intelligence platform for pet travel. A place where the routing information is accurate and up to date. Where providers are verified. Where you can search by your pet's actual size and breed and travel type and destination and get back real, bookable options. Where the complexity of international pet travel — the documentation requirements, the country-specific rules, the airline policies that change without warning — is navigated on your behalf rather than left entirely in your hands.
We called it Get Pet Go.
Jelly did not contribute to the name. But I like to think she approved.
My family is in Spain. That's what started all of this — not a business ambition, not a gap in the market spotted from a distance, but the simple and deeply human desire to get from London to my mum's kitchen table without leaving my dog behind.
That desire is not unusual. It's not niche. It's felt by millions of pet owners who travel — for family, for work, for life — and who face the same tangle of confusion and anxiety every time they try to bring their animal with them. It's felt by people relocating internationally who need to move their cat across multiple time zones and can't find a trustworthy end-to-end service. It's felt by people who've been told they need a rabies titre test and a six-month waiting period and an import permit and have no idea where to start.
Get Pet Go started in Europe because that's where our story is. But the problem exists everywhere. And the platform we're building is designed to be global — to make pet travel more accessible, more transparent, and less frightening, wherever in the world you're trying to go with your animal.
That's the mission. That's what Dilara and I are working toward.
Jelly, for her part, remains focused on the shorter-term goal of getting to Spain as often as possible to be spoiled by my mother, who maintains that Jelly is the best-behaved member of the family. (This is both the highest compliment and a pointed comment about the rest of us.)
She's not wrong, honestly. Jelly has never once shown up with a fake passport.
If you're reading this because you're trying to figure out how to travel with your pet — welcome. We built this for you. Start with our search and see what's possible.
👉 Search pet travel services on Get Pet Go
Get Pet Go is a pet travel booking platform connecting pet owners with verified transport services worldwide. Founded by Franchesca Butler (CEO) and Dilara (CTO), we're on a mission to make pet travel more accessible for every owner, every animal, and every journey.