Noting a self-bias for curiosity-driven enhancements then we applaud this initiative.
It appears to add only a minor incremental experience to sit closeout process.
It appears to seek to recognize negative impact of grade inflation in star ratings.
It appears to sidestep reality that some review text is falsely positive, say to avoid retribution.
It hopefully may identify bad THS members and enable escalation/removal from platform.
As curious-minded people then, unrelated to housesitting, we’ve experienced great professional benefit from simply asking questions, assessing responses and then implementing tactics.
My guess is THS will use the results in marketing. 99% of our members would recommend our sitters to other hosts. I don’t think their number 1 reason is to weed out bad hosts or sitters. I can’t see them contacting someone and asking why you wouldn’t recommend them. A lot of times it’s cultural, personality clashes opposed to breaking THS rules. I hope in the future they don’t display it on the profile. I don’t want to see on a sitters profile, 40 hosts this year would recommend Susie to other hosts. What about people that sit 4 times a year. I think that is in the future, sadly.
The star rating system is a disaster, in my opinion. There should be some kind of benchmarking system so that it can be much easier to gauge what constitutes 4 stars or 5, rather than leave it to everyone to decide for themselves, then feel guilty for giving 4, so just ticking 5.
I set little to no store by reviews on web platforms these days, everyone is encouraged to give out those 5 stars for everything with gay abandon!
Stars and reviews are inherently subjective, “because people.”
My tactic is to skim the star-count as a hint of what’s to come (missing stars being a heads’ up), then comb the actual content of what was written and focus on specific details that are included. If a host or sitter explicitly notes cleanliness, hospitality etc & includes examples, it’s likely to be genuine & accurate.
