I feel like money would be better spent raising awareness of service dogs and dealing with fraudulent (they do call it fraud, right?) service dogs than fining Uber.
When I was trained in restaurants to deal with (potential) service dogs, the extent to which I was allowed to ask any questions was "Is that a service dog?". As long as the answer was "Yes", I was to leave them alone. No questions asked. Anything else supposedly opened you to litigation
Edit: Looks like there's a separate thread with additional ADA info. Tl;dr - nothing you can do to stop people misrepresenting their dogs as service animals.
https://www.ada.gov/regs2010/service_animal_qa.html
Q3. Are emotional support, therapy, comfort, or companion animals considered service animals under the ADA? A. No. These terms are used to describe animals that provide comfort just by being with a person. Because they have not been trained to perform a specific job or task, they do not qualify as service animals under the ADA. However, some State or local governments have laws that allow people to take emotional support animals into public places. You may check with your State and local government agencies to find out about these laws.
Q7. What questions can a covered entity's employees ask to determine if a dog is a service animal? A. In situations where it is not obvious that the dog is a service animal, staff may ask only two specific questions: (1) is the dog a service animal required because of a disability? and (2) what work or task has the dog been trained to perform? Staff are not allowed to request any documentation for the dog, require that the dog demonstrate its task, or inquire about the nature of the person's disability.
> Staff are not allowed to request any documentation for the dog, require that the dog demonstrate its task, or inquire about the nature of the person's disability.
Miniature horses here:
> Beginning on March 15, 2011, only dogs are recognized as service animals under titles II and III of the ADA
And thus now miniature horses are under a much more strict regulatory regime.
In practice, asking these two questions and understanding the limits of where you can intervene is sufficient in 99% of cases.
> you do basically have to take chihuahuas or Pomeranians or pit bulls or Rottweilers or whatever as service dogs
Why is this a problem? Different breeds have different characteristics, and there are a variety of reasons to have a service dog -- from PTSD to blindness to diabetes.
Hah, try it at a hotel that charges pet cleaning fees. Or limits the number of animals in a room. It's 99% sufficient at Costco, because the cost is low of not getting in. When you're looking at shelling out money for a pet fee or not having to pay for pet boarding or pet sitters at home, suddenly 10%+ of the population has service animals.
>Why is this a problem? Different breeds have different characteristics, and there are a variety of reasons to have a service dog -- from PTSD to blindness to diabetes.
It's not a problem necessarily, but you can sort of tell who is and isn't lying about service animals, at least by the discrepancy in total numbers and which ones are coming in with the badges and vests (indicating they don't know about actual ADA laws).
Some folks end up paying a little more on average and some people cheat and pay a little less, but the folks who need service animal accommodations don't get accosted by desk clerks. Sounds like a win to me.
A disruptive pet can cause you to have to refund multiple other rooms, and potential loss of future business too. A disruptive pet can cause physical damage to the room far in excess of the room rate. We once had a pet ruin the carpet so bad the room was not able to be sold for weeks, even after multiple carpet shampoos.
And you also can't go after the hotel guests to recoup costs because the legal fees are hefty and the probability of winning the case, the defendants having money, and actually paying the money are all very low.
Obviously all of this is true for disruptive people too, it's just that pets add another risk. Personally, after what I've seen, I would pay extra to be able to stay at a hotel that could guarantee it never had any pets stay.
> they can't just eat the costs, which are also not equal the price of the room rate
Amortize the costs does not mean eat the costs, it means bake them into the base rate.
It’s also not that simple for smaller business to amortize the costs since the pricing has to be competitive with larger businesses that can amortize over more rooms, so a lot of times, the business does have to eat it. It’s also a very unpredictable cost with high variance.
I worked at a Costco for a few years, these two questions were drilled into us over and over and over and over. People tried to bring dogs into Costco all the time, and we'd ask these two (and only these two) questions. Occasionally, some new employee or someone who was grumpy would go off script and it was considered a very serious issue.
The folks with service animals knew the drill, would answer these questions quickly and succinctly. The ones without service animals would (sometimes) get extremely agitated about them.
It's really tough, because so many people are inconsiderately trying to pretend their animals are service animals, which makes life for the folks who require the assistance of a service animal much, much more complicated. If you've ever considered "just ordering a service dog vest online", please reconsider.
Did the legally allowed questions allow you to exclude the dog very often, or did you pretty much have to concede the matter most of the time?
If someone said yes, and explained a task, then let them through. I'd rather allow an animal that wasn't actually a service dog than disallow one that was.
If a dog becomes disruptive, you can ask its owner to leave.
At my businesses, the instruction is to concede as I don't want to get involved in a costly legal fight. I don't see anyway for the business to come out ahead unless you have a recording and solid evidence of the person lying.
I don't imagine it's any different for Costco. If anything, it's worse since they have deeper pockets to go after for people looking for a fight.
Service dogs are specially trained for a job and cost upwards of $25-30k to train and maintain their training.
Emotional support animals don't require any training and don't have nearly as many rights as a proper service dog.
They're abusing a part of the law most people don't understand (and most companies don't want to add to the drama of even if they do). IANAL, but it was explained to me that you cannot ask basically anything about service animals, other than one thing: "What is your service animal trained to do?". Apparently, service animals are supposed to be trained to do one specific task for their owner. Otherwise, they're not actually service animals. Allowing that question allows companies to verify that the animal is actually a service animal... without offending the people who require the animal.
I was talking to a friend of mine who works for a museum of sorts. These not-service animals are causing problems for them. But they are strictly forbidden to say or do anything about any pet being claimed to be a service animal. I suspect it's because they either (a) don't understand the law, and so they're trying to avoid being liable to anything, and/or (b) they don't care enough and just want to avoid the drama the fraudsters will cause.
I've read comments from people with actual service animals saying they wish companies (airports, etc) would crack down on it though. Because these untrained animals are making their own very expensive animals look bad. AND the untrained animals will yip and snap and pester the real service animals.