Kelly E. Carter and her pooch Lucy Carter at the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel
People can’t pick their relatives but they can select their pets. In 2001, Kelly E. Carter, a jetsetter and then the Los Angeles-based celebrity reporter for USA Today, searched for a dog that didn’t bark and was small enough to travel in an airplane cabin. She turned to the elegant women at the upscale pet boutique Fifi & Romeo for guidance and eventually found an nine-month-old longhair Chihuahua in Pasco, Wash.
How apropos that Kelly and the pint-size pooch she named Lucy (after her mother Lucille and actress Lucille Ball) first met at an airport. Less than two weeks later the duo jetted off to New York City, where they stayed at the Royalton hotel and enjoyed all Manhattan has to offer, including an off-Broadway play. Ten years and countless airline miles later, Kelly founded TheJetSetPets.com, the premiere luxury resource for pampered pets on the go.
Updated daily, TJSP offers a wealth of information pertaining to pet-friendly hotels and airlines around the globe, the latest pet products, advice on traveling with a pet, discussions on pet travel, resources from A to Z and a place for other pet parents to share experiences and photos of their four-legged friends with the rest of TJSP community.
Kelly is a New York Times bestselling author and Contributing Editor at Elite Traveler magazine, where she writes the Posh Pets in Tow column in addition to other stories. She also serves as the pet travel expert for AOL’s Paw Nation. She’s written about pet travel for USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and Departures. She relies on her personal experiences as a discerning traveler and connections throughout the travel and pet industries to deliver only worthy news to TJSP community.
She’s currently writing National Geographic Books’ Dog Lover’s Guide to Travel, a guidebook about the 75 best places to vacation with a dog in the U.S. and Canada. Publication is scheduled for May 2014.
For more information on Kelly and Lucy, visit kellyEcarter.com and everybodyloveslucy.com.
Kelly and Lucy together:
Lucy as the ultimate Petsetter:
Meet Our Contributing Jetsetters
Marin Sardy
Marin Sardy is an essayist, memoirist, and critic who writes about the arts, culture, travel, family and dog-related topics for regional and national publications, including Outside, ARTnews, Mothering and TheJetSetPets.com. Her writing interests veered precipitously toward the canine in 2011, when she wrote her first pet-travel piece with the help of Biscuit, her rascally terrier/Chihuahua mix now known as the Adventure Chihuahua. Biscuit stole Marin’s heart in 2005, when the three-month old pup was rescued from traffic in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and temporarily handed to Marin for foster care. It took one scrub down and one night spent cuddled together for Marin and Biscuit to begin to suspect that they should stay together forever. Now Biscuit mostly relaxes in their New York apartment, but is always ready to take in the sights (and smells) when they go traversing the continent.
