Relying on house sitting while traveling to Europe

I am sure your positive and capable attitude will come across in your profile and once you get those first few reviews the world will be your oyster. Good Luck

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Hi @kellyoldroyd. We did a 12 month tour through Europe, hoping to do housesitting throughout our endeavour. I didn’t quite work out as we hoped!

The visa comments in this thread is very useful, please take careful note of these.

We found it very easy to get back-to-back sits throughout the UK (only). Ireland, France, Germany - still easy enough but with some gaps. Then the problem started with Portugal, Spain and Italy - very few sits. Most of these sits are in the mountains and require a car of your own, which we luckily had. But there are just not enough sits to keep you going full-time, resulting in huge gaps. We had to spend a good amount of our budget on Airbnb’s, and they ain’t cheap, not even off-season. If you want a continuous tour throughout Europe, it would be nearly impossible to do this by housesitting alone. If you are happy to spend the majority of your time in UK, Ireland, France, Germany etc. - then it might still be possible with careful planning.

On the other hand, we did a 12-24 month purely housesitting tour through Australia in 2019/2020 and it was easy as pie to find back-to-back sits. There are so many opportunities there. We do recommend a car if you are going to stay a while. And of course, as always, study the visa regulations carefully.

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Hey Kelly

Like others have said, covering a whole year could pose some challenges unless you were okay with the possibility of potentially longer gaps between assignments.

One of the biggest challenges is the 90/180 rule in general, but one of the biggest specific issues is sits in European countries outside the Schengen area–many Balkan countries for example-- are not super common, so you couldn’t really bank on finding ones there for sure.

The UK would be your best bet for finding sits for the 90 consecutive days you would need to leave the Schengen area before coming back-- if you stayed 90 days in a row-- or bouncing back and forth between here and Schengen countries. If you go in and out of the area, there are sites that help you track your days there and how long you can stay.

This is probably the only country in the region where you could be 100 percent sure you could cover any amount of time you wanted to stay because the amount of listings far exceed the number of people applying for them.

You may also be able to find some sits in Turkey --not far and airfare wouldn’t be that expensive. Sits there are not super common but enough get posted it could be a real possibility. You may also occasionally see a sit in other countries not far from Europe like Morocco.

In your case, it might be helpful to book as many sits as possible before you leave. Owners vary in how far ahead they post their listings, but many will at least several months in advance or more. Of course there is always the chance of cancellations, but in the grand scheme of things, that seems to be relatively rare.

As someone who housesits full time, I have seen firsthand that it is possible to get consecutive sits (barring small gaps in between the end of one sit and the start of another) for years on end.

But when someone is concentrated on one specific country or region for the long-term (barring countries like the UK or US which have hundreds or thousands of opportunities at a given moment) that changes things a bit. The more specifics we have, the less opportunities there will be naturally.

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Thank you so much for this information! I’m sorry your sitting didn’t go as planned :pensive:
You’ve honestly helped a lot with this first hand information thank you!

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Thank you so much for this information! :smiling_face:

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I would underline that. Sometimes sits don’t turn out exactly how you imagine and they end up being very stressful. Read ads carefully so you understand the pet owner’s expectations. Many do not want their pets to be alone for more than 4 hours or so, making it challenging to do tourist things.