Hello sitters, i am a homeowner and my question is about the legend of the “availability calendar” of potential sitters. On my end as a homeowner, i don’t see the meaning of the marks of calendars that sitters post. I see some highlights in green, some with a strikethrough and some are blank. Could anyone explain which means what? Thanks.
Green = sitter is available ( but not necessarily for your location)
White = sitter is unavailable
Struck out = sitter has a THS sit confirmed for those dates
It’s not intuitive and as you say there is no legend/ key - it has been suggested ( many times before )that this would be helpful
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Highlights in green mean that the sitter is available on those dates. The strikethroughs are for housesitting commitments. The blanks are the dates the sitter is not available for personal reasons.
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Worth noting that most sitters don’t use or update their calendars at all. In many cases, all you’ll see are struck-out dates for THS sits, but those dates are automatically struck out when a sit is booked.
Few sitters bother with calendars, because most sit sporadically. That means no motivation to indicate availability — they’ll just search for sits when they feel like it.
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The way the calendar is set up is not very helpful for discerning whether a sitter is truly available.
Sitters cannot enter dates when they are not available, only when they are. So if they don’t enter their available periods, it will all default to ‘white’ without any sort of markings on the date (unavailable), barring any THS sits, which will have the strike through.
So even though ‘white’ means unavailable, the sitter may not necessarily be unavailable. More often than not, it probably means that they haven’t input their available time periods. Like someone mentioned above, the bulk of sitters only do so part time and may not bother with the calendar.
Because of this, homeowners will probably see a lot of calendars that are plain white with out any sort of markings on the dates for long stretches of time–I think most people would interpret unmarked dates to indicate availability.
As long as THS sticks with the input of available dates rather than unavailable dates, and people don’t update their calendars regularly, many HOs will probably read it incorrectly. And they will probably be wasting time sending out invites to people who are either truly unavailable, or are not actively seeking sits at the moment. But there is no requirement for sitters to keep their calendar up to date so stuff like this is unavoidable…no perfect systems.
I do use the calendar and it is always up to date but I may be in the minority on that one!
I remember awhile back, there used to be a notation under the calendar that green dates indicated the sitter was available. I wonder why they got rid of that.
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We never complete the calendar as it is totally confusing for pet owners. The markings make us look full, when we aren’t, and it appears different on a laptop to mobile. I think ALOT of sitters are like us, and don’t complete it for that reason. THS need to update the calendar system.
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I used the calendar when I first started sitting. But I stopped when I realized that 95% of the invites I received were for dates that I already had confirmed THS sits. That indicates that HOs are not looking at the calendar at all.
If THS ever makes a functional calendar I would happily keep it updated. But to me it would need to include allowing me to indicate where I’m available to sit in addition to when. Since most sitters are traveling, available dates are useless if the HO doesn’t know where we are looking to sit. I’d love to be able to indicate that I have a week open in June in the UK and have HOs be able to search for sitters who are looking for a sit in their area.
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Thank you all very much for clarifying. I have rarely seen any green, meaning they dont keep up i suppose.
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@Mira The only dates sitters are definitely not available are dates that have been struck through indicting a booking through THS. The green and white options confuse everybody- sitters may or may not be available.
As others have said most sitters don’t actively work with the calender- we rarely do- and as @systaran says many hosts don’t look at it either and invite sitters who are already booked. We get that too especially at Christmas.
It would ve cery helpful if THS would
create an automatic block for hosts inviting sitters who are already booked- wastes time on both sides.
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