Our sitter for an upcoming sit sent a message indicating a need to cancel the sit, fortunately with months of notice … having not experienced this before this raises some process questions:
Does the sitter or owner take a step to cancel the confirmed sit so as to allow it to be listed again?
If it’s the owner, does the matter get tracked as to who initiated the cancellation? We don’t want to be pinged for a sitters change of circumstance…
Is the listing automatically reposted?
Are there other issues related to cancellation by sitter that I ought to be aware of?
Thanks!
PS. Anyone wanting to sit a wonderful Golden in a beautiful setting in Asheville, NC, for the first three weeks of August, please keep an eye out for the posting or PM me.
Welcome @BruceT! The owner is the only one who has the ability to cancel in their Inbox. If the cancellation was not for an extraordinary reason, then you should inform Membership Services so that it is marked against that sitter and not you. I wouldn’t cancel the sitter until you have notified MS for advice and that you are not the one being at fault.
Once you have cancelled/declined that sitter, your listing will go live again BUT I don’t think it will automatically become a New listing which is what you want. Remove your dates, then re-post them after a couple of minutes and that should do the trick.
It would never be marked against the HO (unless maybe the sitter complained).
There is no should. It is totally up to the HO whether they want to report the sitter. But why would they do that? It was months ahead. In my job, I was bound by just two months to give notice. And that is what I did. (They did not really like that.)
Thanks, I was unable to get the Android app to complete the unconfirm and/or delete the dates, there seems to be a bug where it hung up during the unconfirm. I then went to the web page and was able to delete the dates and relist with the new dates.
PS - I wasn’t looking to get the sitter pinged either, I’m happy they gave so much advance notice (as long as we can refill the sit, if not then I’ll be a bit perturbed!). I don’t know how an owner is supposed to judge if the sitter’s cancellation circumstances are extraordinary, but I trust that the need is real for the sitter.
@temba This is a volunteer exchange through good will. We all have lives and circumstances change. It’s months in advance and they have plenty of time to find new sitters. They didn’t leave them stranded. You don’t need to report everyone for everything
Ultimately you cannot force people to do anything they don’t want to do for any reason.
@BruceT you literally just click to cancel and then relist your sit. There’s nothing more to it and no black marks on anyone - nothing like that even exists
The Homeowner has to “unconfirm” the sitter. This cancels the sitter. It does not automatically repost the listing, so you have to repost the listing. You can also contact previous candidates, and past sitters and invite them “privately” if you are interested in doing that.
THS does not track cancelations so this doesn’t count against the sitter or you. However, if you feel there was something off about the cancellation – eg the sitter cancelled because maybe they got a better offer, or because they are kind of flaky, eg – nothing “extraordinatory,” and an inconvenience for you and other sitters you declined, then you can report the cancelation by contacting member services. I’m not sure what member services will actually do whether they contact the sitter to get their side or just “watch” the account for further reports as I’ve never actually reported a sit. But once I mentioned a shady cancellation on a thread where a sitter had in fact taken another slightly longer sit and left me in the lurch a few days before my sit giving me a suspicious explanation, and the moderator invited me to report it even though it was months later.
IMO and stated elsewhere, THS should be tracking cancelations on both sides to get an idea of how many cancelations are actually happening, the reasons, and whether or not steps can be taken to prevent this, including whether or not a very few people are cancelling often.