Sorry, your crazy to accept an unclean house. You are doing an unpaid serving and a clean house it what we all expect. If you don’t mention and rate it clearly the next sitter will experience the same! We are no cleaning ladies!
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I know we should have walked away but it was very late and we didn’t really see the state of the kitchen until the following morning when I went down for coffee.
Ok, thats fair enough then. I assumed with your name, you were retired so i was confused about the need to work
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Would probably tackle it a different way to say something along the lines of “Warm, welcoming hosts and nice pets. Comfy bed & sparkling bathroom although kitchen needed a thorough clean before we could settle in. Living space is adequate but not relaxing and a huge amount of personal effects to accommodate in and around the home. Would suit “so & so” type of sitter but not for the WFHers, minimalists and clean freaks out there.” Or similar. Not too long. Not too personal. Take the stars off the clean bit of the review and then mark the overall experience accordingly. #bestofluck
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Thank you for the helpful wording!
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This sounds like a nightmare for you. I would leave a very honest review. I am fortunate that my sits have all been in clean and neat spaces. I scour each HO photo to make sure the home ticks my cleanliness and neatness box.
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We are leaning more and more each time about ‘vetting’ before applying.
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Its not only what you see in the photos, its sometimes what you can’t see in the photos too.
We all learn something on every sit.
Good luck for future sits
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As a sitter, I’d appreciate the level of detail in your original draft. Cuttlefish’s suggested draft works as well.
For some future potential hosts, your original draft might scare them off offering you a sit, but personally I think that’s a good thing, because I’d rather avoid all iffy sits. What you described would put me off sitting entirely. I wouldn’t consider that an equal exchange.
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I like your original wording, though I would remove the complaint about a noisy washing machine. That could deter future homeowners who don’t have state-of-the-art quiet appliances!
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I think the feedback you have put together is good overall and as always @Cuttlefish has offered a great write-up–mentioning the clutter is important because that specifically can be a problem for many people.
While much of the difficulty of writing an honest review was attributed to the possibility of ‘retaliation’ that existed under the old system, there are other factors at play that the new review system wouldn’t address.
Pointing out negative things about someone’s home is not the same as pointing out the negative things in a restaurant or some other business. I think many sitters understandably feel badly they may hurt someone’s feelings, especially if the person was really kind and they got on well.
And on top of that, there is probably some concern about whether future HOs will check their feedback from previous sits and how they will perceive what they wrote. And of course, people are free to respond to these reviews and they may not do so kindly, which would also be seen in these instances.
So I feel for people when they post here about their bad experiences and the struggle they may experience about how to write the reviews. It’s a tricky thing for sure.
While I have certainly experienced some unexpected things on sits, or a house here or there that wasn’t as clean as I have liked over the last 10 years, I have never come close to experiencing some of the types of issues people post here on the forum, such as extremely dirty homes, gross misrepresentations of the responsibilities, poor treatment by, and conflicts with, the HO’s etc…
So I have never found myself needing to write feedback that contained anything truly negative. I would probably struggle with it a bit, and again, feel for people in that position.
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