How to use the approximate dates feature?

I’m not quite sure how to use the ‘approximate dates’ option as a host. I’m posting for the Christmas holidays and have flexibility of when we go to our relatives, but I’m not sure how to make that clear to sitters. Any help from folks who can see my listing?

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Mention flexibility in your sit headline and then share specifics of that flexibility in the body of your listing.

There is no “feature” per se. Just follow @Maggie8K advise and note your flexibility in your listing headline and listing.

There kind of is a feature in the Android app, but I haven’t seen a similar one on the website. I think I ticked the box once early on, but it didn’t seem to do much. Maybe it did something on the sitter side, like make my listing appear in searches despite not exactly matching date filters? In any case, now I just ignore it and state flexible dates at the very top of my listing.

For the curious, here’s how it appears in my app. It only shows up when I’m editing existing dates, not when I’m trying to create new dates.

Yes! This is what I meant. I can check it but it doesn’t seem to let sitters know any information. I went in and changed the title of my listing to show flexibility - hoping that will help. Please see my listing link in my forum profile
Edited to remove the link in the comment as per posting terms.

Where in the body of the listing? There doesn’t seem a logical place to squeeze it in. I did add it to my title, in hopes of getting someone.

Edited to remove link

The listings I’ve seen include that info in the introduction, to avoid wasting potential sitters’ time reading info that’s irrelevant if timing doesn’t work for a sit. That seems logical.

BTW, I just checked out your headline. I suggest editing out the “delightful pets” part and tightening so your headline doesn’t break off — some sitters won’t bother clicking to read the rest of the headline and might miss your location.

Most people think their pets are delightful and such descriptions offer prospective sitters no substance. You want to make the most of your headline.

Thank you for checking it out, I’ll edit it!

Can @Carla or @Jenny find out what this feature does and let us all know? Maybe there’s an option to solve some of the overlapping dates issues. Ie. If this box is ticked, sitters may apply for the sit if their current booking only overlaps by a few days at either end. Just a thought.

Hello @Timshazz Thank you for raising the question of what this feature does. I can certainly pass it back to the team and ask, in the meantime, you can also reach out to the Membership Services team as they might already know more about this :slight_smile:

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@Carla I would thinks its of most interest to home owners, but as noone here seems to know what it does, it seems best to post it here in the forum from an official source than approach member services one at a time.

Hello, @Timshazz Membership Services often will already know the answers to these types of questions. Any member can post the answer on the thread to help the OP and community.

The forum team aims to help as much as we can. When you see us answering on the Product threads we have prepared these with other teams and departments.

We will always try and help answer ad-hock questions about the function of the site, if we don’t know the answers then it is always best to reach out to the Membership Services team as the forum was not designed to be an extension of Membership Services. They will be more than happy to help anyone and feel free to post back any answers here :slight_smile:

Thank you for this tip!! I hope it positively affects the search results on sitters’ end.