Dog travel gear, checked against the seat and the spec sheet.

Why this exists

Traveling with a dog is mostly a set of small, boring problems with expensive wrong answers. The carrier that doesn't fit the seat. The "safety" harness that was never crash-tested. The water bottle that leaks into your bag. The GPS tracker that turns out to be a Bluetooth tag. Paw & Passport exists to get those small decisions right, so the trip is uneventful — which, when you're traveling with a dog, is exactly what you want.

We cover the whole journey, not one leg of it: the carrier for the plane, the harness for the car, the crate for the hotel, the bowl for the rest stop. And we do it with two things the field mostly lacks — a dated table of airline under-seat limits that our carrier picks are matched to, and a published method you can check.

Who writes it

Paw & Passport is written by Stephen V.— an enthusiast who's genuinely into traveling with dogs. That's the honest framing, and it's the whole of it. He reads the manuals, compiles the published specifications, cross-checks them against airline rules and safety certifications, and does the arithmetic. No lab coat, and no claim to have flown with every carrier or crash-tested a single harness.

We're deliberate about not overstating that. You will not find a fabricated bio here, an invented credential, a made-up "years of experience," or a claim that we tested gear we don't own. The ranking field in this category leans on credentialed bylines and real test labs; we can't honestly imitate that, so we don't try. We compete on transparency instead — and transparency happens to be the thing that's missing.

What we do

• Compile the manufacturer's published dimensions, weights, materials and safety claims.
• Cross-check carriers against each airline's published under-seat limit, with the date we checked.
• Score every product against a published rubric and show the breakdown.
• Pull prices live from Amazon and stamp them with a date — and hide them when they go stale.
• Put a "don't buy this if…" on every product, because the honest caveat is the useful part.

What we don't do

Here are the numbers that matter most on a page about trust — and each is a category where zero is the good number:

• Sponsored placements accepted: 0. No brand pays to appear or to rank higher.
• Free products accepted: 0. We aren't sent gear in exchange for coverage.
• Fabricated reviews or ratings: 0. Our scores are editorial judgments from research, never invented customer ratings.

We haven't flown with every carrier here. What we did instead: compiled the published dimensions, checked them against each airline's under-seat limit, and did the math — and we cite it. When we can't verify something, we say so on the page rather than quietly leaving it out. Read the full editorial policy and affiliate disclosure, or get in touch if you spot something we got wrong.