Certainly NO offense intended…..100 “favourites” is not too shabby !!!
From someone who “favourites” quite a bit, I’ve personally seen absolutely no benefit, no advantage in doing so. I don’t get any notification from THS when these sits become available and I’ve yet to see any advantage other than the occasional, “Oh, that looks cool. Maybe I’ll check back and see if they’re looking again”. My work not anything on the part of THS.
The only HO’s who have reached to me out have been local-ish and not “favourited” by me.
@toreishi You don’t get notified when a host you have favorites posts an upcoming sit? That doesn’t sound right and is contrary to what I’ve read. In fact that’s the primary purpose for favoriting a host. Check your notification settings.
I also believe that it is because the “nicer” season to travel to Greece is pretty much over, and that the people who were interested in travelling there might simply not be any more and don’t want to receive lots of notifications that sits in that country are available. Plus, I’m assuming that are fewer people sitting in the off-season.
We don’t receive notifications for favourited sits, which is frustrating (and have checked our settings; notifications are on).
When checking listings, I always check out favourites first and use the filter to show those accepting applications. It’s worked twice for us, recently.
On the app, there’s a little heart icon at the bottom of the page, marked ‘favourites’. Click on this, then click on the broken lines icon (for want of a better description) in the top right hand corner, and select ‘currently accepting applications’, then ‘see filtered favourites’.
On the website, click on your image or name at the top of the page, select ‘favourites’, then click on the small ‘filter’ icon on the top right of the page. Activate the ‘accepting applications’ slide and click ‘apply’.
Like many others here we ‘spring clean’ our favourites on a regular basis. For example we’re just winding up several months of sits in France & Spain. Along the way, whilst planning, we favourited lots of sits that could have potentually worked for us but ended up with other sits instead. So recently I deleted most of those except a couple of stand out ones which I’d like to keep an eye on for future! I much prefer to work with ‘Saved searches’ for specific places and dates. I get notifications for them (but not for the favourites strangely) but usually delayed therefore not so helpful anyway! So ultimately the best way for us is to manually check our saved searches regularly.
Great discussion, @idocsteve It turns out the ‘spring clean’ of favorites is a thing… how interesting.
As a side note, I love Greece so much! Count a +1 on your already long list of favorited .
Update. The couple that said they would do the sit changed their minds (we had not yet confirmed their sit pending a video chat).
So after reaching out to 11 sitters that were on my favorites list and who showed interest in my prior dates, I received 4 declines, 1 sitter asked for a reminder of which listing it was (I sent the information and they never followed up), and 1 said yes then changed their mind. Half didn’t reply (at least not yet).
This does not appear to be an effective strategy. I have just listed the dates on the site.
We reached our applicant limit within an hour of posting the dates, all applicants were 5 star sitters with multiple reviews who all wrote extensive intros. We’ve scheduled a video chat with one of them who happens to be from the same home town in Australia as my wife and that is where we are headed for this upcoming trip.
We will most likely accept this sitter but rather than add the other applicants to a favorites list and promise to reach out next time, I will thank them for their interest and let them know that we travel several times per year so perhaps they can do it another time.
As a followup, after we recently listed available dates, the number of sitters that had dropped from 175 to about 100 is now up to 256. So there seems to be somewhat of an ebb and flow, to the whole thing, either due to turnover or increased interest during certain time periods and definitely due to adding sit dates.
I still Favorite listings and find it useful because my travel schedule/options are flexible. But this specific thing frustrates me greatly…it makes it difficult to find or group favorites effectively & there’s no way to search through or cull them when my criteria changes.
i feel another feature suggestion coming on…
Similar to others’ suggestions, it may be that many are culling as they will no longer travel to the US right now…and there are now areas in the states where I will no longer risk traveling, even as a US citizen.
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