The Liberty Hotel is a pet-friendly place. Staff members bring in their dogs; guests check in with birds, ferrets, even a monkey that stayed for six months during a movie shoot. So when the Boston hotel started offering pet insurance as part of its employee benefits package two years ago, workers saw it as a natural extension of the health care plan.
“People who are dog people or cat people, they love their pets as much as they love their own children,’’ said general manager Rachel Moniz.
Pet insurance offered by companies such as Liberty Hotel is becoming increasingly popular as owners grapple with the rising cost of caring for their animals and employers look for additional, low-cost ways to keep their workforce happy.
For companies, pet insurance is a voluntary benefit, similar to life insurance or financial planning services, that they can offer at a group discount. The cost, however, is paid entirely by employees. Voluntary benefits are becoming more prevalent as consumers seek more options to manage costs and other risks during a down economy, according to the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, and companies look for perks they don’t have to pay for.
Meanwhile, the increasingly sophisticated treatments available to animals, from ACL surgery to pacemakers to chemotherapy, have sent pet bills soaring, making insurance a more palatable investment.
“We’re bonding with our pets the wealthier we get, and once we become more bonded, we see the value more of taking care of their health,’’ said Dennis Drent, chief executive of Veterinary Pet Insurance Co., known as VPI, who once asked his wife how much she would be willing to spend on their longhaired miniature dachshund. “I got to $10,000 and my wife didn’t even flinch.’’
Like health insurance for humans, pet coverage can vary widely, though it typically runs a few hundred dollars a year, depending on plan details and type of animal. It is now a $300 million business in the United States and expanding rapidly, with sales more than doubling from 2005 to 2009, according to the market research firm Packaged Facts.
Still, only 9 percent of companies in the United States and Canada offer pet insurance, according to the employee benefit foundation.
VPI has contracts with nearly 2,000 employers, 172 of them in Massachusetts, including Staples Inc., Comcast, and Massachusetts General Hospital - a 40 percent jump in the past year and a half.
Sean Reardon racked up $1,500 in vet bills caring for a bullmastiff puppy that ended up dying of unknown causes, so when his family got another puppy about a year ago, he signed up for VPI’s pet insurance through the Liberty Hotel.
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