Additionally, during COVID people took advantage of the time of being in their home to actually adopt pets
at near record levels. The rate of pet adoption in the U.S. quadrupled versus the year prior due to COVID.
So, while the travel market will recover and
we suspect that there may be pent up travel demand, we also have seen a wave of new pet owners. And, if you think about the type of pet owner that waits until a pandemic to adopt an animal, its highly likely that those are the type of people
that were concerned around not being home enough and thats the reason that they didnt already have an animal. So, we think this new wave of pet owners will likely be predisposed to using Rover Services.
More generally though, the competitive dynamic that exist are fragmented. As alluded to earlier, most of the market is tied up into friends, family and
neighbor segment and there are local boutiques, there are pet care chains, there are franchises business, there are sole proprietor businesses.
Sometimes, you may find those businesses on a Craigslist, Nextdoor or Yelp. But again, the vast majority of the market is in the friends, family and neighbor
segment, and its incredibly fragmented. So, the commercial options that do exist tend to not have much scale, and the online penetration of those solutions is very limited.
Its virtually impossible to book care directly via an app or online. And, more often than not, therell be a number you can call. Therell be
a lead generation form you can figure out, but most of these businesses are not native digital natives.
And more generally in the pet care
industry, there are few pet care specialists operate at any level of scale who are primarily digital. If you look more broadly at the number of pet companies that are digital first, theres few. Theres Rover, theres Chewy,
theres Amazon, as largely the company that have direct ongoing digital transactions with seven-figure level look households.
We think that puts us
in a great opportunity not to just to continue to grow and expand our relationship with our customers, but also to launch new businesses overtime as we have a direct digital relationship with a large number of
pet-owning households.
Rovers technology platform helps people find care providers, but it wasnt
designed just to help people find care providers. Our goal from the beginning was to build a platform that also facilitated care delivery. We do this by providing 24/7 support, a potential consultation with vets or vet techs.
We provide technology that allows for in-app messaging, photo sharing, mapping. We make it easy for payments. The
Rover guaranteed backstops they use that are booked through Rover.
And we also use technology and data to identify which care providers are not only
providing excellent service but are continuing to transact through the platform. And we give those care providers that are both incredibly good at what they do and keep business going through the platform advantage in our marketplace, and we send
them more future business.