Plenty of cats refuse food for a day in a new pen, and any honest boarding service will tell you so. The question worth asking is not whether it happens, but what the service does, hour by hour, once it does. Stress appetite loss sits on a slope: at the top, a healthy cat skipping meals in protest at new surroundings; further down, a cat for whom not eating has become a veterinary matter. A good service knows where its own threshold lies and can describe, unprompted, the path it walks a cat down before that threshold is reached.
Pin Down the Waiting Period
Ask how long they wait before acting, and insist on the answer in meals or hours rather than moods. A service that monitors intake knows that your cat refused breakfast and lunch, because somebody recorded it; a service that relies on impressions knows only that the bowl looked fullish at some point. Ask who records what each cat eats at each feeding, where that record lives, and who reviews it at the end of the day, because a record nobody reads is decoration.
Ask whether the waiting period shortens for cats who arrive with known conditions, for very old cats, or for cats who were already poor eaters at home, and say plainly what your cat's normal intake looks like so their baseline is your cat's baseline, not a generic one. Ask whether cats who are not eating are weighed, and how often. The answers separate observation from assumption: waiting is a legitimate first phase only when it is timed, watched and written down.
What They Try First, Asked as a Process
Ask what they try first when the waiting period ends, and listen to the shape of the answer rather than grading individual tricks. You are listening for a described routine: food offered in the cat's own pattern, a quieter pen or more privacy considered, familiar items from home brought into play, and each attempt noted so the next shift knows what has already failed. A service that improvises afresh every shift will repeat the same failed offer three times and call it persistence.
Ask whose job these attempts are, and whether the person feeding your cat is the person who fed your cat yesterday, because a familiar feeder removes one layer of strangeness. Ask whether they will follow your written feeding routine exactly, including flavours, textures and times, rather than substituting whatever the kitchen has open. Their process, described fluently and in order, is the product you are buying; vagueness here is the answer, whatever the brochure says.
The Call Point: You, and Then the Vet
Ask for the point at which they call you and your vet, stated as a threshold rather than a feeling: after a set number of missed meals, after set hours, or on set signs such as vomiting, hiding that deepens, or a cat who stops drinking as well. Ask who makes that call, how quickly you would hear, and whether they act on your vet's advice or only their own in-house judgement. An early phone call costs a good service nothing and buys your cat time; a service reluctant to define the point is reserving the right to hope for one more day.
Before the stay, get the agreed sequence and the rest of the provider's terms confirmed in writing, so the plan you were promised is the plan on the wall during the booking. That comparison baseline travels neatly through Pet Passport in KinsLe, giving the service your cat's usual portions, preferences and vet number in one organised packet.