For a young, adaptable cat, travel arrangements are a matter of taste. For a senior cat whose health is being monitored, the kindest decision is usually made before any booking: she stays home. Home is where her routines, scents, hiding places and resting spots already reassure her, where nothing about her day has to change except the person providing it. Keeping her in place also keeps her monitoring honest, because her appetite, mobility and litter habits can be compared with her normal rather than with how any cat behaves in a strange pen.
Keep Her Home in Her Own Territory
Arrange care that comes to her: a live-in sitter who keeps the house running around her, or twice-daily experienced visits from someone who has handled senior cats and will stay long enough at each visit to feed her, clean her litter, watch her move and sit with her, rather than a five-minute bowl refill. Choose a person she has met before the trip if that is possible, ideally someone who has fed her while you were out for an evening, so the first visit is not also a first introduction. Keep everything else about her world untouched: same food in the same place, same litter, same blanket on the same chair, and her usual routine of meals and quiet company at the usual times. The shorter the trip can be, the better, and a daily update with a photo at an agreed time lets you see her posture and surroundings rather than relying on a bare assurance that she is fine.
Agree the Monitoring Plan Before You Go
The monitoring plan is agreed with her vet in writing before the trip, not improvised by phone from an airport. Sit down with the practice while you are still home and settle three things in that written plan: what to watch, naming the specific signs that matter for her, such as appetite dropping, water intake changing, litter habits shifting, mobility worsening or new hiding; who to call, with the practice's number first and any out-of-hours service named; and in what order, so the sitter knows whether a change means phoning you, phoning the vet or taking her straight in. Leave written permission for the sitter to present her at the practice and authorise necessary care in your absence, and confirm how the practice will reach you. Get the sitter's agreed terms confirmed in writing as well: the visit pattern, the dates, the fee, what updates you will receive and what happens if you are delayed, so the arrangement rests on a document rather than goodwill and memory.
Brief the Sitter on Her Normal
A sitter can only spot change against a baseline, so brief the sitter on her normal in detail before you leave: how much she usually eats and how eagerly, how she moves after a nap, where she sleeps at each hour, what her litter tray normally shows, how she greets a familiar person and how long she takes to accept a less familiar one. Walk the sitter through one full visit while you watch, including where food, litter, cleaning things and the carrier live, and how she prefers to be approached, since a senior cat who dislikes being cornered or lifted needs handling on her own terms. Note the small things a stranger would misread, the arthritic pause before a jump, the deafness that makes a touch from behind startling, the one room she never enters. Leave the written monitoring plan, the vet's numbers and your own contact order on the counter, not in a drawer. Access for that one named sitter, limited to the trip itself, can be handed over through Care Pass in KinsLe, so her carer reaches only what the visit needs and only while you are gone.