Hello, fellow sitters! I feel so grateful to THS for bringing us a world of opportunities, including this Forum to pitch ideas.
My idea is a new filter-by-exclusion function for searches.
THS is undisputed world leader for house- and pet-sitting. Great! But its success in the U.S. market means my saved searches are flooded with U.S. sits. (There are 340 million people in that country!)
Right now, it’s next to impossible to sort by location. It would be so simple to add an Include/Exclude option to the filter. How about it, THS? Are there other sitters out there who’d welcome this function?
My example uses the U.S., but I could imagine many other uses, such as excluding one’s own country, or a place too distant, etc., etc.
Please let me know what you think.
All the best,
Maryanne
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I would find that feature helpful. I also find it frustrating that we can’t filter out dates we are already booked. The filters are lacking; it would be great if, like many other sites, we could create custom filters or at least an option to hide posts we aren’t currently interested in.
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I typically run my sit searches to only include my preferred destination. I also have several notifications set by county and city, then filtered by additional preferences. Running a global search has never been efficient for me, even with the option to exclude certain countries, the results would still be too overwhelming for me.
@Maryanne, like @Themavericksitter then we use Saved Searches based on the destination geography. So we are searching ‘for’ a geography rather than ‘excluding’ a geography. Seems to work just dandy. We see no US housesit listings other than those that we previously favourited.
That said, I’ll give get another kick for a geographic filter for Schengen zone.
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Thanks for your thoughts and insights. I have three saved searches, filtering by: dates; pets; duration. One is for my home country, the other two are “world,” because there’s no way to specify multiple locations (for instance: Europe and Australia).
I do manage, but it would be easier if I could exclude locations, especially when using the app/mobile interface.
Thanks for your comments!
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Whilst we are on the topic of filters :-
Allow filter selection of the whole facilities list - I.e include Aircon or parking or anything in the list
Option to omit any available sits with dates that clash my agreed sits
Allow selection of favorites with current sits only
Allow application to sits that overlap by a few days. Couples can manage this.
Add data item for how many bedrooms are available to the sitter and then filter on it
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You CAN filter your “favorites” list to show only those with active listings.
This is fun.
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There are many technical improvements that could be made to the search. I wonder if they don’t do them because the model works better (for the company) if people don’t screen too much out and take what they can get. Or maybe the changes would just cost money in terms of staffing hours and they don’t want to spend it.
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I’m find the excess of US sits rather annoying too, but I suppose no non-Americans want to go there any more so they must be struggling to find sitters. I wish there was an excess of sits in Europe! 
An"exclude" button would be brilliant.
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You can excluse the US. It take a bit of work but it’s probably faster than going through all the sits. If you type in the dates you want to go on the sit and just leave the location empty or on ‘anywhere’; then zoom in on the map that’s on the right of the page, zoom in and then move the move to a point where the US isn’t on the map anymore.
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How exactly do you make a search by dates only? I’d like to be able to see sits searched all over the world for say a specific two weeks in October.
First search for a specific country for specified date range . ( e.g France , 1-30 September )
Then adjust the “where would you like to go ? “ filter to “Anywhere”
Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. To be blunt, there are 195 countries in the world and I don’t want to set up 194 searches to to be able to eliminate one country, population 340 million, that I will never consider. THS makes lots of money off that large 340 million market, and no doubt there are many thousands of local sitters to serve that market. So please give the rest of us a break and add an Exclude function to the search. I can send you the HTML code for the search, if that would help.
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You can search for “Anywhere” and THEN use the filter for dates. Then save the search.
This is an interesting idea. I might use it!
I would like to have a filter for gender for the animals. I travel with my dog—he’s a male dog. I would like to find sits with only female dogs.
But this is is not currently an option. It would be very helpful for me in my searching.
Thanks
@Maryanne, suspect that a search filter of “Anywhere except US” may not be super popular with THS team . THS has stubbornly refused to introduce “Europe except UK”.
But we’d cheer for joy at a search geography of “schengen zone”.
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Yes, this is a known issue. Not using the US example but Europe: for every 100 UK sits on THS, there’s about 3-4 sits in the rest of Europe.
Since I live in continental Europe and mainly do sits there (and quite seldom in the UK) I would LOVE to be able to filter out the UK sits when searching for sits in Europe. Equal to your example, if I include UK I have to wade through a ~100 UK sits in order to see the few non-UK sits.
Excluding is not possible however. So the only workarounds I’ve found in 10 years on THS is to manually move the map around multiple times, such that I can see parts of Europe without the UK. Obviously you have to do this at least 3 times for full results (1st: all Europe sits east of UK; 2nd: all sits south of UK; 3rd: Ireland sits).
It’s very inconvenient, but no solution so far in the past decade…
@Bluehorse. Indeed we use similar tactic on saved searches. Bit clumsy but works.
A search criteria for schengen zone would be useful. But ideal solution is that THS have many more listings in schengen zone 
I just zoom in on the world map so that the UK falls off the map; this automatically makes the sits disappear.
How does this work if you want to see all sits in Europe excluding UK only??
When I zoom in on Europe (or select Europe), UK is of course included on the map. Next I have to manually move around the map multiple times (right of UK, south of UK, Ireland) if I want to see all European sits other than UK.