Debbie: I think one or two subsets of Europe (Continent) are very needed. (1) Europe (EU) Now that ETIAS is likely to be implemented sometime this year, an EU-specific subset makes sense. (2) Europe (Schengen) Especially important since an astonishingly high percentage of non-Europeans don’t really “get” the Schengen Zone rules or know which countries are now included in the rolling 90 of 180 rules.
FYI for those who are not clear on Schengen: here is the Schengen Zone page displaying a map with explanations of how various countries comply with Schengen:
@ASASG Once again, I did not say I was opposed to subsets.
Nor do I have any influence to do anything about them.
And I completely agree that many non-Europeans (and perhaps even some Europeans) don’t understand the Schengen Zone and its implications. That was literally the reason I posted on this thread!
I wonder how other global travel platforms handle this?
Debbie - I didn’t mean to impy nor do I think I said anything that was in disagreement with you? I’m just reiterating what I believe to be logical subgroups.
Answering my own question here! I had a look at AirBnB to see of they have filters / search options for European Union or Schengen.
They don’t have filters for European Union, although you could search for various institutions beginning with those words.
Searching for Schengen brings up the village in Luxembourg where the agreement was signed, and buildings / businesses places shown on their map as “Schengen Visa” in Kosovo and London.
They do allow searches for defined geographic areas including Scandinavia, The Balkans, Iberian Peninsula in Europe, New England in USA, Western Cape in South Africa, Sunshine Coast in Australia.
In principle, Nomador has a similar problem, but then with France. It is even more dominated by sits in one country. (A merger with THS would be nice…)
The issue for me is how lopsided it makes searches.
Including the UK in a search of Europe results in 93% of sits in the UK and 7% in the rest of Europe.
It isn’t working for Home Owners trying to find sitters outside the UK nor for sitters looking for sits outside the UK.
Public transport accessible sits in Europe reach their 5 applications in minutes, I realised this when looking for sits in France last year. It is fairly rare for sits in Europe other than the UK to remain unfilled for very long, as there are probably more sitters looking to sit in Europe outside the UK than available sits. So perhaps the imbalance actually works in these hosts favour.
I would like to see multi-selection of countries to save as a search. Whether I choose three or thirty countries should be up to me. And the country names should be in a static list for selection, not an algorithmic text matching scheme as it is now. I could choose Ireland, Albania, Finland, Thailand, and Madagascar, and save them to one saved search, with start/end dates and other criteria of my choosing. Anyone else want to vote for this?
I’ve raised it a few times with support over the years, to no avail.
For those who are travelling, they have limited time they can spend in the UK, for example, so they look for sits in Europe that will allow them to spend enough time away to them later apply for another visa.
Unfortunately, if you set quote Europe quote as your search filter, you have alerts coming up every 25 seconds, but 98% are for UK.
It’s so impractical. “Mainland Europe” as a search filter would easily resolve this problem.
Albania, Montenegro, Georgia, Turkey… These are all not part of the Schengen zone. (Tbf Turkey also comes up on Asia search). And Croatia will be added by the end of this year, but isn’t now.
These are not in the Schengen zone, but are mainland Europe.
Instead of trying to manage it to changing political regions or visa requirements, simply saying “Mainland Europe” vs “Europe” would suffice, I think.