Sunday Boarding Pickup in Ronkonkoma: Open Seven Days

The most annoying thing about boarding a dog is not the price or the paperwork. It is getting home on a Sunday and discovering you cannot collect until Monday. Our Ronkonkoma location boards seven days a week, Sunday included, and the check-out window on a Sunday is the same as any other morning.

Open every day of the week, Sunday included

Ronkonkoma is our full-service location: grooming, doggy daycare, overnight boarding and a retail shop under one roof. The hours are not identical across those services, so here they are separately rather than smudged into one line.

Grooming at Ronkonkoma runs 9am to 5pm. Daycare opens earlier and closes later, 7am to 7pm. Boarding sits inside all of that with its own two windows — an afternoon and evening arrival, a morning departure.

None of this changes on a Sunday. That is the whole point of the post, and it is the one thing worth knowing before you compare anywhere else.

Weekend departures and weekend returns both work

Most trips are shaped the same way. You leave on a Friday evening or a Saturday morning, and you come back late on a Sunday or early the following week. Both ends of that shape are covered here.

Long Island MacArthur Airport is in Ronkonkoma, the same hamlet as the salon, and the Ronkonkoma LIRR station is a major Main Line commuter and park-and-ride hub. If your trip runs through either of them, a Sunday morning pickup on the way home is a real option rather than a favor you have to ask for.

The pickup window is 7am to 11am, Sunday included

Check-out is a morning window: 7:00am to 11:00am. It is early on purpose — it gives the day a clean start for the dogs still staying and for the ones arriving that afternoon.

If your Sunday does not fit inside that window, say so when you book rather than on the day. Daycare at Ronkonkoma runs 7am to 7pm every day, so there is a way to structure a later collection — but it needs to be agreed in advance so the day is planned around it. Turning up at 4pm unannounced is the one version of this that does not work well for anybody.

What a night actually includes

Every boarding stay includes a full day of daycare at no extra charge, so the day before a Sunday pickup is not spent sitting in a kennel waiting for you. Meals go out at 8am, 1pm and 6pm, and custom schedules are available for puppies, seniors or medical diets. You can bring your own food, or we can provide it at $5 per day per dog if you would rather not pack it.

Sales tax of 8.75% applies. If you also use daycare between trips, the passes are worth a look — 5 days for $162.50, 10 for $300, 20 for $550, with no expiration date, though they are non-refundable.

Adding a bath before a Sunday collection

Plenty of people want the dog to come home clean rather than smelling like somebody else's week. Grooming is on site, so it can be built into a stay — but grooming hours are 9am to 5pm while boarding check-out runs 7am to 11am, and those two things do not automatically line up.

So treat it as a request, not an assumption. Tell us at the time of booking that you want a bath before you collect, and we will tell you which day and what time that puts your pickup at. Bath and brush is priced by weight, $35 to $120, and a full groom with a haircut runs $70 to $155. You can see the current pricing on the grooming page.

Ask about the bath when you set the dates, not when you arrive to pick up.

Setting your dates when you book

One more honest note. Bordetella vaccination does not fully prevent kennel cough. What people call kennel cough is really canine infectious respiratory disease complex, and the AVMA describes roughly eleven contributing pathogens. The vaccine is required and it is worth having — it is just not a force field, and any coughing dog should see a vet rather than a groomer.

When you do not need us

If you are away for one night and you have a neighbor who can let the dog out twice and sit with him, that is often the better answer for a dog who genuinely dislikes kennels. Boarding earns its keep on multi-night trips, on trips where nobody is home during the day, and on trips where you would rather your dog had company than an empty house. It is not a moral obligation for every overnight.

Questions people actually ask