Owner & sitter here. I have a complaint If like to raise to THS owners and admins.
Why are owners listing their location sometimes even an hour from their ACTUAL location?
I am looking for sits in NYC and the sits popping up are listed in NYC but are located about an hour away from New York City (not even in the boroughs or in the same state.)
THS @admins can this please be reported?(with a button that the THS community has been asking for foooooor ever pretty please, cherry on top?)
As H.O’s we’re supposed to provide accuracy in our listing so that sitters can have a clear idea of where they are applying to stay at. I feel that listing the wrong city just to get more applicants is wrong & on the sitter side, it’s a hassle to have alerts pop up for a city and then look at a listing, only to find that it’s well over an hour away, simply “two trains and a bus ride” away from the city you actually wish to stay in.
Ok rant over.
Tldr: accuracy of location for listing matters.
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We have seen this before and it is usually due to the HO location being remote or far away from public transport or the big city. They will list the big city like “Phoenix” or “Dallas”, but really…it could take over an hour to get to one from side of the city to the next. OR if they live in a small town outside the city, they will just put the major city name and in the description say their towns name.
Not sure why, but I guess they think it helps their chances of finding a sitter?
Here is a long conversation about this from a while back: HO that live in the wrong city as they say in the sitting - #94 by LIQ
Nothing has changed – except that in my case, I found if I listed as “Manhattan” rather than “New York City” the pin on the map moved from 7 miles away to about 2.5 miles away in the middle of a lake and I now have a screen shot of the general area in my photos. Unfortunately, not every homeowner is going to devote this much time and research to try to come up with a fix for a problem that shouldn’t be a problem to begin with because THS needs better tech.
Raising a “complaint” here with owners or sitters is worthless as very few people members percentage wise ever come to the forum or will see it. While moderators sometimes take complaints to product teams in THS, I don’t know that much systematic change comes as a result of concerns raised in the forums. You can try writing an email to member services. You will probably get a reply written by a bot and unseen EVER by human eyes. It is very frustrating. The most helpful pieces of advice I’ve gotten from the forum have all been work arounds.
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Definitely don’t waste your time reporting these errors. I sent at least 25 clear examples (in a 3 month window) to admin, and nothing happened. I had wasted my time.
In California, lots of Owners who do NOT live in San Francisco, place their location in San Francisco. It is really annoying, and it actually hurts Owners.
Perhaps a Sitter really wants to do a Sit near Stanford (Palo Alto), for example, and the Palo Alto Owner puts their location as San Francisco. The Sitter might not see the listing!! It is a shame that some Owners don’t understand this from the Sitter’s perspective.
Some are just clueless. Others are purposely deceptive.
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When searching for a house sit, the THS website offers a map showing the sit locations. Is that map inaccurate in terms of location? Or is it the description written up by the HO that is misleading?
The THS mapping function seems to work much like AirBnb. When looking for sciatica, I might enter a desired destination and get back a list of possibilities but it is the map function that shows me the distance from my desired destination.
It really doesn’t work that precisely and it’s BOTH issues. Say you are looking for a sit in London, you’ll get a bunch of sits that don’t say London and could easily be an hour or more away by train. Nothing to do with the homeowners. That’s the system. So you have to look at the map and maybe consult google or another map app to figure out what getting to London would actually be like from there.
Then there is the other problem. The system does not base the map on the homeowner’s given address. They base the map on how the homeowner answers a question: “Nearest city, town, or village.” That is where homeowner inaccuracy may come into play. That will be the basis of where the maps pings. The map system they use has a pull down which might not contain every villlage or neighborhoods in particular cities so if you are trying to tell the system you live in a particular neighborhood within a city, you won’t get accurate mapping.
Then there is the THIRD issue. If you are in a city the dot might simply be in the geographic center or some other place that isn’t where you live. So in my case if I say “New York City” not a lie, the dot is in the southern tip of Manhattan Island about 7 miles from where I live. If I say “Manhattan” – also no lie – the dot is in the middle of a lake in Central Park, about 2.5 miles from where I live.
The workaround for sitters is just to apply to anything that MIGHT be where you want to go and sort it out if the homeowner gets in touch.
The workaround for homeowners who want to be more accurate, is to simply be as accuarate as they can when answering the “nearest” question and maybe provide a screenshot from maps in the photos without identifying your actual home to give people a better idea of the neighborhood, and to write the name of the neighborhood.
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The map is grossly inaccurate!
For example, just about every pet sit listed for any of Melbourne’s (Australia) sprawling suburbs plonks the pin in the CBD.
Unless the listing specifies the suburb, you have no idea of access by public transport, for example, or how far away it is from the actual CBD.
Our own location name does not come up as an option, it defaults to the nearest town which is 15 km away from us, and no public transport. We do clarify that in our listing, but if people just look at the map pin, it gives totally the wrong idea.
All very annoying.
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To be honest - I wouldn’t want the listings to be as accurate as some wish. This is due to the fact that there’s a bunch of information in the listing, completely open and available to all online - and not on a site with access only to paying members.
This is a potential risk to both sitters and hosts. Both sitters and hosts can be exploited in various ways by so much info. being made available without having any control on who gets the info., how it is used etc.
For the same reason I haven’t filled in in my listing all that THS nudge me to do. I offer the information in my application, as then I know (more) who I give the info to, but I don’t want to leave it open to all for possible identity theft, burglary or whatever.
This is a major issue and I don’t know why THS sees this as a good solution business-wise. One would think it would be the more profitable option to have some info for members only, or at the least that each member themselves can decide to tick a box “open online” or not. This is done on several other sites so it can’t be that hard.