Hi, I'm Willy ──
the human behind Petaholic
I'm based in Taiwan and share my home with two cats and two dogs. All four of them are rescues. Petaholic isn't a name I picked lightly — it was once the name of the pet hotel I owned. This site is what came after.
Why this site is called Petaholic
Back in 2014, I loved cats and dogs so much that I wanted a job that let me spend every day with my own pets. So I opened a pet hotel and named it Petaholic.
The dream looked beautiful on paper. The reality was something else. Running a pet hotel isn't "cuddling animals all day" — it's getting up at 3 AM to check on a feverish guest, breathing disinfectant for ten hours straight, and watching everyone else travel on long weekends while you don't have time to drink water. I learned the irony quickly: I had opened this place to be with my pets, and they were the ones being neglected.
The breaking point was when Rum got sick and had to be hospitalized. He's the tabby who normally never leaves my side — but he had been quietly losing energy for days, and by the time I noticed something was wrong, he needed admission. I sat in the vet's waiting room watching other people's pets being looked after in my hotel, while my own was in a hospital cage because I had been too busy to see he was hurting. That's when I knew the business had to end.
Closing the hotel left me in debt, but looking back at those years — caring for hundreds of pets, listening to anxious owners on the phone at midnight, adding extra blankets during typhoons — those memories are still warm. I couldn't keep running a hotel, but I could find another way to do the same work.
That's how Petaholic the website came to be. I document the pet-friendly hotels I've actually stayed at, the trips I've planned (and the ones that went wrong), and the resources I wish I'd had when I started traveling with my own. The goal is simple: the next pet owner planning a trip should have less to figure out from scratch. This is how I let the name Petaholic keep working.
The four of them
My household has four pets, all adopted. There's a small naming rule: dogs get Japanese names, cats get cocktail names. That's why you'll see Sake, Rum, and Gin in the same family.
April
April originally came to me as a foster from a local shelter. The plan was to find her a permanent home — but black dogs are notoriously hard to rehome (an effect known as "Black Dog Syndrome" in the rescue community). After enough months together, the bond was already there. I officially adopted her when she was two. The shelter named her April; my best guess is they found her in the spring.
Rum & Gin
I walked past a street adoption event one afternoon, saw these two brothers, and made my mind up in about three minutes.
Rum is the tabby — the same Rum who landed in the hospital and quietly closed down my pet hotel. He's still the most clingy member of the house. Gin, the orange-and-white one, is the well-behaved brother and the household's most punctual dinnertime alarm clock.
Sake — the first one
Sake was a pure-white Chihuahua. He had been discarded by a backyard breeder before he was rescued, and he was already five years old when I adopted him from the shelter. You could still see traces on his body from being kept as a breeding dog.
I named him Sake — the Japanese word for rice wine — because he was white like a glass of clear sake. That name later started the whole "alcohol naming" tradition at my house. Rum and Gin only exist because he came first.
Chihuahuas have a reputation for being anxious and barky. Sake was the opposite. He was the most emotionally steady Chihuahua I've ever met. It didn't matter who came over, what changed, who held him — he had the eyes of someone who had already seen it all. I think after five years in a breeding facility, there wasn't much left to be scared of.
He stayed with me for twelve years. From 2009 to 2021 — through me figuring out how to be a pet owner, through Petaholic the hotel opening and closing, through moves and job changes and everything else life threw at me, he was quietly there.
One night in 2021, he passed in my arms. The illness was age-related; we had been treating it for a while. He chose to go while I was holding him. I think that was the most dignified goodbye he could think of.
What Sake taught me became the foundation of this entire site: every pet who has been loved properly deserves the best trip we can give them — whether that trip is seventeen years long, or just a weekend.
What else I do
My day job is running Thaiwonder, a travel company I've been operating in Thailand for the past seven years, with a Taipei office added in 2023. I also keep a personal blog at wwc.tw where I write about travel, tour-leading, and life in general.
Every hotel, restaurant, and destination recommendation on Petaholic is vetted against real data sources before it gets published — no invented hotels, no fictional addresses. If you spot something that doesn't look right, or you want to recommend a place you've visited yourself, please let me know.
Editorial policy & affiliate disclosure
Some of the links on Petaholic are affiliate links with partners such as Agoda and Klook. If you book through these links, we receive a small commission, but your price stays the same. These commissions help keep the site running, but they don't influence what we recommend — the only places we list are places we genuinely believe are worth bringing your pet to.