I let my membership run out last month, as I was not particularly interested in renewing due to the changes.
A friend and I are thinking about taking a trip in August to somewhere in Europe. Spain, Italy or something like that. I wondered about renewing and us just booking a sit as I’ve done lots over the years with friends and its been fun, but I’ve done a few different searches now over the last week, and it looks like sits in Europe (outside of the UK) are scarce.
Is this the case at the moment? I don’t want to waste money renewing for nothing.
Italy in August is when all the locals holiday apparently. Theoretically there should be some available. Will the sit suit? Just remember it’s not quite a free holiday.
I noticed there are loads of sits in the UK indeed! Never done one there yet though. Sits in the rest of Europe are maybe “scarce”, but there are definitely ways of getting sits!
What really helps is:
- → if you find a host that’s not currently looking for sitters but you like the place, save it and you’ll get a notification as soon as they upload a listing
- → looking for specific places or even countries, then save those searches, and keep an eye on your phone/laptop
- → log into THS several times a day, search for a few minutes and see what comes up
It got me to France multiple times, Crete multiple times & Austria. And Czechia, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, and the Netherlands, but those weren’t through this platform, haha.
We have had no trouble obtaining sits in Europe for the past 3 years (European summer months) - France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands and Germany. But we actually start planning months in advance before we head overseas. We like traveling off the beaten path, so prefer rural sits. We left Oceania in May of this year, but we had booked all of our sits between December and mid-January. I think that the standards THS require (for listing information, etc) are heads and shoulders above other platforms (based on our experiences). We have been so fortunate to have wonderful and appreciative home owners, and we do vet pretty carefully, but we found the key for us is starting to plan months in advance (because initially we thought, like you, that sits were scarce and because of the time difference between north and south hemispheres we were seeing new sits that had already been filled by the time we woke up to read them ).
).