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.