I am a new sitter at my first home sit. It is a local sit so I can begin to build up some ratings and experience for longer/further away from me sits. The home is not as it was pictured in the ads. It is dirty and has a foul smell, but this could simply be a difference a standards. It is a dirty laundry smell, not a urine or cat litter smell. My clothes (and car!) now vaguely carry this smell. Examples: the floors are dirty and unswept, all the upholstered sofas/chairs are stained and covered with pet fur, there is clutter everywhere, crumbs on the counters, just very messy and not well-cared for. They did not fill out the welcome info, but had their young daughter take some videos of the food bowls, etc just prior to them leaving. They preferred for me to arrive AFTER they had left. When I didnât receive the welcome info I requested a phone call, which happened, and the woman was perfectly pleasant and answered as many questions as I asked, although some of the answers were vague (When does the dog need to go outside in the morning? Whenever I wake up. When do the cats need to receive their food? At breakfast and dinner. Kind of like that. When I asked for times, they couldnât give me a definite.) I did NOT feel comfortable sleeping in the home for the 2 nights of the sit, so went home to sleep at bedtime and came back when I awoke. This is the 2nd day of the sit, and I arrived back at the home at 8:00am and the dog had already peed on the floor by the backdoor! I cleaned it all up, stayed a few hours to cuddle, and am now back at my home as I do not want to stay in the home all day because of the unpleasant conditions. Of course I plan on returning to feed/walk/care for the dog, the 2 cats, 2 gerbils, and fish, but will not ârelaxâ in their home in between caring for the pets. They return tomorrow afternoon, and have said I can leave before they arrive. I am confused about what rating to give this family. I would NOT recommend anyone else staying in this home, certainly not a tourist or anyone looking for someplace to stay while they travel. I live 15 minutes away and could not take it for more than an hour or two. They seem to be nice enough people who may struggle financially, or simply have different standards of care for themselves and their pets. Of course I am looking for good ratings myself, as a new sitter. I need the best advice of the community! Thank you in advance.
You kinda broke the THS contract by not sleeping there. So maybe not mention that.
One way is to wait until they have left their review. Then to write to them about the condition, and what you noticed, and see how they react. If they go ballistic, leave a warning review. If they are sorry and want to make it better in the future, leave a review that is as nice as possible, but still mentions the issues. This way the next sitter knows what to check before accepting the sit.
Review honestly that the home was so dirty you could not remain there.
You should have notified THS immediately upon arrival with photos, videos and asked to cancel the sit (and HO can either have their emergency contact step in or since it was 2 days you could care for the pets during the day on a drop in basis. You should not unilaterally not stay overnight without notifying THS first.
I am sorry to hear about your bad experience, but you canât be mad at the dog for having gone to the bathroom inside when you were gone all night, which is not something a THS sitter is supposed to do. The arrangement is that the person will stay in the home overnight.
If you plan on doing more local sits, this is not something you should make a habit of doing. Not only is it against the terms of the agreement, if a host somehow got wind of it and made a complaint against youâespecially if something serious happened to the home or pet in your absenceâyour membership with the site would be in jeopardy.
Leaving negative feedback is never easy but just do your best to be as diplomatic and non-emotional about it as possible.
Good plan to do local sits to build up your reviews. You might want to consider doing an in-person visit prior to confirmation (if it is local) to avoid similar situations. I wonder if they were purposely trying to not cross paths with you. Please review honestly. The HOs seem undeserving of 5 stars in any category. Oh and the not staying overnight thing? Yeah, donât do that again.
Your review of the host will not be seen until they submit a review for you or 14 days have elapsed since the end of the sit. After 14 days, no reviews are accepted. So the only âdangerâ in not being honest about the homeâs condition in your review is that future messy/dirty hosts might think you too picky. Iâm not sure itâs actually a bad thing for sitters.
Be aware that if they do not submit a review for you within the 14 days, your profile will include nothing about having done the sit. It will be as if it never happened.
I would suggest being honest and written simply as facts phrased without a judgy tones. If the hosts anticipate a poor review from you, they may preemptively write a negative review of you. Unfortunately, it happens. You (and they) can respond to a review 1 and only 1 time. There is no time limit on when you submit a response so I suggest waiting for a few weeks to, again, write a non-judgmental factual response without being defensive or emotional.
Was this the first time these owners had had a sitter @AthenasDaughter? If so, they have a lot to learn. By writing a factual, unemotional review, it should help them as well as prospective sitters in the future.
She doesnât need to wait to write her review, as neither party can read the otherâs review until either both have written one or the window has passed.
You have 14 days to give a review. If itâs a great sit then itâs easy to review quickly. Where there are some issues no harm in taking some time to reflect or even put up a test review for comments here. Some forum participants have honed these skills particularly well with a measured response.
Curious. How many stars should be given? Please weigh in.
Communication
Cleanliness
Itâs difficult to say other than less than 5.
Whether itâs 1, or 3, or 4 really depends on the exact situation, which on a forum is impossible to determine.
As a new sitter, leaving a negative review for a host, especially if theyâve got a stellar 5 star review record will reflect poorly on you, not them.
The host will likely challenge your review in their reply and it becomes the good old âhe saidâ/she saidâ scenario which leaves viewers wondering what really happened.
In all likelihood, with no history to back it up, you will be viewed as the unreasonable nitpicky sitter and savvy hosts who check reviews left by sitters for other hosts will not be inclined to accept your application.
This is precisely why, as a host with only one 5 star review at the time, I left a 5 star review for a 3 star sitter who had about a dozen prior 5 star reviews.
Cleanliness Iâd give one star
Organisation Iâd give 3 stars
However you did something very wrong in abandoning the sit overnight. If the HOs get wind of this and of course they might be in this ForumâŚ. youâd get one star for care of the pets!!
My advice: take far greater care in confirming any future sits. Write yourself a list of important gatekeeping questions to ask the HOs at the âexploratoryâ stage of the process:
- What would you say your attitude is to housekeeping is it casual/homely or very particular?
- Have you written a Welcome Guide and can I see this- please send by email.
Thatâs disingenuous and not good advice. And no not all HOs would interpret a new sitter leaving one star on their first sit as unreliable, they might think âtheyâll learn to pick betterâ but at least other sitters will have new information to consider.
Thatâs true, not all of them would but itâs fair to say that some, or even many will view the review and the sitterâs credibility with a question mark especially if itâs up against a 5 star host with a history who challenges the review with a believable narrative.
Negative reviews help other members, they do not help the person leaving them.
Itâs rampant among the membership base, as itâs human nature to take care of oneâs own needs at the expense of others. The problem with hosts and sitters leaving self serving dishonest disingenuous reviews was so widespread that THS started the âdouble blind reviewâ system to discourage it.
Oh dear you did something very bad too, but first to answer your post, mark them down for cleanliness in your review, but just remember that hosts âmayâ also read what you write to get an idea of who you are, so make sure any wording is factual about the cleanliness but also kind.
Secondly, never stay away from someones home unless they know about it beforehand, youâre breaching the THS terms. You are there to help safeguard their property too. Imagine if their home had been broken into on that night, I dread to think of the hassle that would cause you, but more importantly right now, it affects their review scoring if they didnât know beforehand that you planned to sleep away. Youâd get zero points for âreliableâ, âorganisedâ and âpet careâ, because you breached the terms.
Sooooo, because you canât change the past, if you havenât mentioned sleeping away to them already, then perhaps say nothing on that front to them and hope their neighbours didnât realise you didnât sleep too, and say nothing of that in your review of them too. Itâs done now, you canât reverse the past, lesson learned.
Most homes we go to are really clean, and the others are more âlived inâ but adequately clean and so still worthy of 5 stars in our eyes. But donât expect a place to be totally spotless, it is their home after all and not a holiday cottage (but I donât think you have those expectations anyway, you got an unclean place).
It is not âhuman natureâ for all but might be yours of course. When I write a review I primarily write it for future sitters, Iâm also providing useful feedback for the HO. I can take this standpoint because Iâm very secure in who I am; my personal ethics about doing right by others is my priority. I suspect cultural differences play a part here, also maturity and altruism.
I feellike they may have considered that I might do that, as the rooms in the house looked nothing like the pictures on their profile, and they set up my arrival time to be after their departure. This is my first sit, and I just didnât have the confidence to call them and tell them to cancel their trip and come back because I was leaving. As it turned out, I cared for the pets as they requested without making use of their home (which they had no need for me to care for in any way). Maybe I should have called and asked if I could do thisd without staying at their house, but I was sensitive to the fact that they might think it was because I didnât care for their home, and I didnât want to deal with that straight out of the gate, I suppose.
I am absolutely not âmad at the dogâ for going to the bathroom inside the house. It would have done this whether I stayed at the home or not. The dog sleeps the night in the room in which it urinated, and I would have been asleep in the bedroom if I had stayed the night. I made the comment to highlight the fact that I asked for a time to let the dog out in the morning and was told âwhen I wake upâ, even after asking a second time for an actual time to do this. I normally wake up between 8:30 and 9:00. I arrived at the home at 8:00, waking up at least an hour earlier than I normally do, to find that the dog couldnât wait until 8:00 to be let out. This would have been important information for me to know. Iâm not sure why you would get the impression I plan on making a habit of not staying in the home for a sit after sharing my dilemma about these particular circumstances.
The in-person visit is a good idea, and I feel a video chat or walk-through prior to committing to the sit might be appropriate for me in the future as well. That is a great idea. The evasiveness and the lack of coherent instructions caused me some concern, but the last thing I expected was a house that looked anything like what they advertised.