Billy Calzada, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographerSAN ANTONIO — After a decades-long career owning and managing hotels, Deven Bhakta is digging into the doggy day care business with plans to open seven locations of the Dogtopia chain across San Antonio in coming years.
After signing a franchise agreement with Dogtopia last year, he opened his first day care center in April on De Zavala Road on the Northwest Side. Two more are set to open in December, in Stone Oak and Alamo Ranch. Another, in Alamo Heights, has a scheduled opening of early next year. Bhakta is president of ZJZ Hospitality, which operates 11 hotels in the Corpus Christi area. He relates the doggy day care business to the hotel industry in the latter decades of the 20th century, when brands such as Hampton Inn and Holiday Inn Express spread across the U.S., offering consumers a consistency in quality that hadn’t existed when the industry had largely consisted of mom-and-pop motels.