Why PACCC Matters More Than Most Pet Resort Owners Realize — And Why We’re Proud to Be Their Marketing Partner in 2026

What PACCC actually is

PACCC is an independent, third-party certification body for pet care professionals. Their mission is to bring independent testing and certification to the pet care services industry, something they describe as an important step for a rapidly growing, easy-to-enter field that’s frequently damaged by news reports of serious pet accidents and deaths.

That framing is worth sitting with. The problem PACCC is solving isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a safety problem that became a marketing problem, because every headline about a preventable incident at a boarding facility makes every pet parent in the country slightly more hesitant about every facility in the country, including yours.

The word doing the heavy lifting is independent. PACCC isn’t a training company certifying its own graduates. Exams are administered through Professional Testing Corporation with proctored, scheduled testing windows and standardized content. That separation between who teaches and who verifies is the basis of credibility in every serious professional credential, from accounting to nursing.

The three levels, and why the structure is smart

PACCC offers three certification levels, and you don’t need to earn one before moving to the next — you pick the level that fits your current role.

• CPACP — Certified Professional Animal Care Provider. For the person in charge of daily handling of the animals in a professional pet care business. Your kennel techs, daycare attendants, handlers.
• CPACM — Certified Professional Animal Care Manager. For the person in charge of daily operations.
• CPACO — Certified Professional Animal Care Operator. For the person responsible for overall operation of the business. Owners and multi-site leaders.

The tiered structure matters more than it first appears. It means certification isn’t a one-time trophy in the lobby; it’s a career ladder you can build a staffing philosophy around. A new hire can see a path. A strong handler can be developed into a manager with a credential attached to the promotion. In an industry with notoriously punishing turnover, that’s a retention tool.

Certifications run on a three-year cycle with continuing education and recertification requirements, so the credential reflects current knowledge rather than something passed once in 2019.

Exams can now be taken virtually from anywhere, or in person at Prometric locations, a change that removed one of the biggest historical barriers for facilities in smaller markets. Practice exams and prep resources are available through the site.

The case for certification, stated plainly

PACCC frames the benefits across three audiences, and each maps to something real in your business.

For your team, certification sets a professional apart as someone who values continuing education and quality care, elevates the value of their services, helps build and retain teams that share the same values, and keeps staff current on best practices.

For pet parents, independent third-party certification guarantees continuing education and training according to established industry best practices, requires adherence to a code of ethics putting pet welfare first, and offers peace of mind about who’s caring for their animal.

For prospective employees, it signals a workplace that puts animal well-being ahead of other business considerations and invests in its people.

Let’s translate that third one, because it’s the underrated benefit. Hiring is one of the hardest problems in this industry. Good handlers are scarce and expensive to replace. A facility that pays for certification, supports study time, and promotes credentialed staff is a materially more attractive place to work and attracts a different caliber of applicant from the first conversation.

Where certification meets your marketing

We spend our days thinking about how pet parents choose facilities, so let us make the marketing case specifically.

In the pet resort buying journey, the longest and most decisive phase is the trust evaluation. A prospect has narrowed to three or four options and is now looking for reasons to eliminate. They’re comparing photos that all look similar, reading reviews that all say roughly the same things, and trying to answer a question no website copy reliably answers: are these people actually good at this?

Almost everything a facility can say at this stage is self-reported. “Our team is highly trained.” “Safety is our top priority.” “We treat your pet like family.” Every competitor says the same sentences. They carry roughly zero persuasive weight, because a bad operator can say them just as fluently as a great one.

Certification is one of the very few claims a prospect can independently verify. PACCC maintains a public certified directory, which means the claim isn’t just a badge in your footer — it’s checkable. In marketing terms, that’s the difference between an assertion and evidence.

There’s a second, quieter benefit. PACCC also markets directly to pet parents, with a guide on choosing a provider and a public service campaign teaching owners what questions to ask. Every pet parent PACCC educates becomes a more discerning shopper — unambiguously good news if you’re one of the facilities investing in doing this properly, and less comfortable if you’re not.

Our 2026 partnership with PACCC

Which brings us to the news.

Pet Resort Marketing is PACCC’s preferred marketing agency for 2026. We’re honored because this is an organization whose work makes the entire industry we serve better.

Two major workstreams:

Paid advertising

We’re managing PACCC’s paid media, with the goal of putting certification in front of the pet care professionals who’d benefit from it and haven’t yet encountered it. A large share of the industry simply doesn’t know independent certification exists as an option. That’s a reach problem, and reach problems are solvable.

We’re also mindful that PACCC serves two very different audiences: professionals considering certification, and pet parents learning what to look for, which require distinctly different campaigns, messaging, and measurement.

A complete website redesign

This is the bigger project, and the one we’re most excited about.

paccert.org carries a lot of weight. It serves candidates navigating exam registration, certified professionals managing CEUs and recertification, educators applying for program approval, pet parents evaluating providers, sponsors and volunteers, and a public directory that has to be usable by someone who’d never heard of PACCC before this morning.

Serving that many audiences well is an information architecture problem before it’s a visual design problem, and we are excited to get started.

If you’re a facility owner reading this

Go read PACCC’s exam information. Figure out which level fits you and which fits your lead handler or manager. Note the deadlines: April 1 for the May window, October 9 for November, because they come around faster than you’d expect, and missing one costs you six months.

Then consider making certification part of how you operate rather than a one-off. Budget for it. Build study time into schedules. Tie it to advancement. Facilities that treat professional development as an operating line item rather than a nice-to-have tend to be the ones still standing and growing five years in.

And once you’ve earned it, actually market it. We see far too many certified facilities burying the credential in a footer while their homepage leads with the same generic trust language as everyone else. You did the hard part. Say so.