Along For The Ride w/ Sonali Nigam

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How A Lifelong Journey With Dogs Inspired Sonali Nigam To Start Her Petminded Travel Company

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About The Episode

Sonali Nigam grew up in New Delhi, India for the first 17 years of her life. Growing up, she always wanted to take in any stray dogs she saw on the street. Around 10, she got her first puppy (that she shared with her sister). As an introvert, the dog became someone she connected to and brought out a different side of her.

For college, she went out to California. During this time, she lost her dog – without getting a chance to go back to India and say goodbye – but learned a valuable lesson on the importance of family and what that meant to her.

The plan was to go back to India after college, but she got a great job offer and ended up living in San Francisco for five years before coming to New York City for grad school (studying health policy, after working at a biotech company).

Now it’s been around seven years and she’s still in NYC. Outside of work, she got into a relationship. At that point, she had a cat who ended up passing away shortly after. It made an impact on her and she held off getting another pet for a bit, only to realize that it was a part of her heart that would never be filled if there wasn’t a four-legged creature there in her life. Her now-husband had never had a dog, and so when she decided that she was ready and wanted a dog, they started off with fostering. But the first one they took home became their first and only foster, Ella.

As can be the case with rescues, Ella was a good dog that was also struggling with certain issues. One of those was separation anxiety. She didn’t like it when Sonali and her husband would leave their apartment. This led to them slowly but surely bringing her more places, starting small on the subway and with road trips upstate. Eventually, she started flying on planes and they found out how to make it work.

While at airports during traveling, people would always ask her questions about bringing Ella and saying they wish they could do that, or that they tried but it was hard, and all sorts of similar questions. Through that process, Sonali realized a gap. Researching for traveling with your pets was hard and cumbersome, and there wasn’t really a great resource to help people with that. She knew dogs are people’s family, just like they have been for her throughout her life, and people want to have meaningful experiences together with their family. So she started her own company and website named Petminded Travel, which connects people with the best places to stay, activities to do, where to eat, and more. Right now it’s focused mostly on locations in the U.S., with hopes of later expanding worldwide.

About The Guest - Sonali Nigam

After being raised in India and coming to the United States for college, eventually making it her new home, Sonali has learned a thing or two about traveling. But when she got her current dog, a rescue named Ella, there were issues with separation anxiety. So she started taking Ella with her and her husband on trips. Sonali realized how hard it was to just plan around traveling with a dog. The idea was then born to start Petminded Travel, a resource for people to use to know what cities to go to, what activities to do, where to eat, and more connected to bringing your dog with you while traveling.

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