@systaran - I think this is the reason for keeping the rule, not that I agree with it. I agree that “someone” needs to be financially responsible for the pet, but not that the “someone” needs to be the sitter. 
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@Lassie I noticed that and thought the same thing. The HO should always be financially responsible for the pet even if they are out of town. The sitter is there to provide care, not pay bills.
Right. Like if you hired a babysitter, they wouldn’t suddenly be responsible for paying for your kid’s medical care.
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@Angela_L Without meaning to be sarcastic, tell that to the pregnant woman who is being told that the birth control pill is 99% safe. The statistics mean nothing to her, or to the sitter who is the exception and is faced with an emergency.
I can follow all the steps suggested by the T&C, pay the absent owner’s vet bill, and then be faced with an owner who will return only to say they would not have authorized that particular treatment. As a responsible sitter, I would follow the advice of the professional, the vet, and yet still not get paid and not have any financial backing from TrustedHousesitters.
I always have a conversation with the owner where I start by saying: Is your pet a budget or a blank cheque? However, there are still too many variables to cover every situation. Bottom line for me is that I will not financially cripple myself as a volunteer, unpaid sitter.
Yes, I have emailed membership services concerning this point but I can already see that a template answer is likely to be the response.
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As terrible as it sounds, the outcome of this unrealistic THS T&C making the sitter the first line of responsibility for the pet owner’s vet fees is that sitters will not take the animal to the vet if they are at risk financially when the owner is uncontactable to authorise treatment and payment. The threat of the sitter being in breach of the T&Cs is of little consequence compared to them potentially losing thousands of dollars.
Pets will be the victims.
This is behaviour THS is driving through their stubborness to see reason and find a better solution.
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As hosts we always inform our vet that we are travelling and have a pet sitter take care of the herd. We pay any cost afterwards, or if we’re away for a longer time, directly to the vet. No problem at all with bank apps. Com’on, it’s 2023. If the vet would want direct payment (which she does not)we could transfer money real time. And we’re not living in that big high tech country, but in rural Thailand.
@MiqueFrançois Excuse me for disagreeing. Not every vet is willing to wait for the owners to pay the bill on their return.
Our house vet is ok with this but not the emergency vet hospital we recommend. We tried to set up an account, but they won’t do it.
Yes it’s 2023 but there are still countries and places in the world one might want to travel to and can’t be contacted, let alone advise payment. We have been to the Okavango Delta in Botswana last year and for 14 days there was neither phone nor internet reception. We stayed in quite luxurious lodges but they don’t provide WiFi.
It would not have been a financial problem for the sitters, however, because we always make sure to have an emergency contact, who would pay the vet bills in case of an emergency.
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I just think that whatever the circumstances, & however exotic & remote the holiday destination is, the HO has a duty of care to set up payment for the vets in their absence be it credit card, an account, an envelope of cash or a nearby neighbour/friend who will stump up the finance whilst they’re gone. One of these is always possible, it’s simply in the planning and shouldn’t be be left with the sitters. Ever.
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Yes I completely agree.
As a HO I would not dream of leaving the pets behind without making sure beforehand that there is someone to pay for the bills in case of an emergency. This can be handled differently by the pet owners and it actually doesn’t matter how they do it, as long as the sitters don’t have to pay anything.
I don’t know about the sitters’ finances and I don’t ask. I also don’t need to know.
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Just had a look at the T&Cs for Rover - a paid pet sitting service and even they don’t hold sitters liable for veterinary expenses when the homeowner cannot be contacted for authorisation.
2.8 Emergencies. We recommend that Pet Owners give their Service Providers contact information where they can be reached in the event medical care for a pet becomes necessary. Service Providers agree to immediately contact Pet Owners in the event such care becomes necessary or, if the Pet Owner is not available, to contact Rover at the applicable telephone number or email address listed in the table at the end of these Terms. If you are a Pet Owner, you hereby authorize your Service Provider and Rover to obtain and authorize the provision of veterinary care for your pet if you cannot be reached to authorize care yourself in an emergency situation. In such case, you also authorize your pet’s veterinarian(s) to release your pet’s veterinary records to Rover. If your Service Provider reaches you with a request to authorize medical care for your pet and you refuse, you release the Service Provider and Rover for any injury, damage or liability arising from failure to seek such care, including from reimbursement that may otherwise have been available under the Rover Guarantee. Pet Owners are responsible for the costs of any such medical treatment for pets and, if you are a Pet Owner, you hereby authorize Rover to charge your credit card or other payment method for such costs. In certain circumstances, a Pet Owner may be eligible for reimbursement under the Rover Guarantee. Rover recommends that all users have adequate pet insurance to cover the costs of veterinary care.
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Isn’t there a very simple solution to this issue or am I missing something. I agree that “someone” has to be responsible for vets bills during a sit and in my opinion this, logically, should be the owner(s). It should be a requirement of owners to ensure they are able to set up an account with their vet or provide the sitter with a pre-payment card of some sort to be used only for that purpose. If this ridiculous requirement for sitters continues I imagine it will only be a matter of time before there is a problem eg. a sitter delays a vets visit because of the concern about the cost to them which could result in a more serious illness or even the death of a pet. The point that most sits happen without the need for a vets visit isn’t a valid one - T&Cs are supposed to cover all recognised eventualities and simply dumping the responsibility on sitters is not acceptable.
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How thoroughly ridiculous to enforce the sitter to pay for the HOs’ pet fees! What’s wrong with the vet calling the HO, and asking them to pay the fees over the phone, like other bills? I don’t assume anyone would want to pay a bill on behalf of someone else, and then hoping they’d re-imburse them. This condition, surely is not legally enforceable?
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plus, I have no idea how THS can say it’s a rare occurence that we need to visit a vet: I did have to visit a vet, how would THS know about it? I didn’t share anything to anyone in the company when I sat, so how would they know all pets in the world are healthy, don’t need vet care often, because we don’t call them in case of an emergency?? we just don’t share it with the company, because…why would we?
I know a sitter had to go to a vet for a dog we sat before them, simply because I went back to the profile and read their review. It could have been us, and it wouldn’t have been statistically picked up on.
how does THS know? Because they didn’t follow up on any of my 39 sits I did officially on the platform, let alone the repeat ones.
So I assume I wouldn’t be the only one. Meaning many visits to the vet in an emergency, wether it was covered by the HO or not, must have happened without THS knowing.
THS: are you using your own experiences to affirm things like that? Or you simply want to reassure us? You can’t report on things that weren’t mentioned to you in the first place.
Multiple times on the forum, members have asked you to explain how you came up with numbers and conclusions, yet you failed, pretty much every time, to do so. You can say you, as a company have no need to report to us, the customers…but then you can’t expect us to simply take your messaging as a solid one, since you don’t back up your claims. You can’t use a politician strategy, and be taken seriously. That doesn’t reassure your users.
I don’t think going to the vet in an emergency is a rare occurence, especially as THS is growing exponentially, you are bound to have more experiences repeat themselves, statistically speaking, good or bad…
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no that’s fine, nothing wrong with the vet calling the HO. But not all vets will agree to that, as it’s simply not their job.
That’s when the clause becomes dangerous to the sitter, as it is faced with making all financial decisions in case of emergency and HO not being reachable.
@Nadia, I agree - we have had several trips to the vets during our time with THS and we are not full time sitters.
These visits - two of which were emergency situations, one a dog reacting badly to a wasp sting and another a cat relapsed after surgery. None of my experiences involved THS or the online vet so how can they quantify ‘rarely’ when they don’t even know about it?
The visits involved using our own car which is another thing to be taken into consideration if the sitter does not have access to transport.
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We too have had several occasions of needing to take dogs to Vets, sometimes emergancy situations, sometimes using our own car. So far the owners had Vet accounts or reimbursed us immediately (e g for small medicine pick up etc (but no one ever offered to reimburse fuel costs) None of these occasions were reported to THS as there was no need. I’m sure many other sitters could say the same so how can THS know if Vet visits are rare or not if they don’t have the figures?
As a sitter I was not aware of the clause in question until reading it here on the forum and fortunately we have not yet been in a situation of being ‘held to ransom’ over Vet fees. From now on we’ll be asking all Hosts if they have arrangements in place, in whatever form, to cover all possible emergancy situations.
I agree 100% with @Cuttlefish that the onus on payment upfront should NEVER fall on the sitters. And as @LizBCN says its only a matter of time before a pet suffers unnecessarily because a stressed out sitter is not willing or able to foot the bill. Having a pet fall sick or die on our watch puts an immense stress on the sitter and they definitely should not have to worry about the Vet bills as well. That is absolutely not OK.
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So this discussion has aroused my curiosity. Out of 115 house sits, 12 of those involved taking a pet to the vet, about 1 in 10! I actually went through my house sits and counted. Five of these pets had to go back to the vet for follow up visits. This certainly has not been a rare occurrence for us, or maybe we’re just unlucky.
On our very first house sit, we had a dog that ingested some of the contents of his bed after I found him chewing it. It was the weekend, he was vomiting and the only place available was the emergency vet. The HO’s were in SE Asia and unreachable by cell phone due to a dead battery. The clinic would not even see the dog without a $1400 deposit, which we put on our credit card. They did an exam and x-rays, and recommended immediate surgery. They would not treat without the HO’s permission, and we did not have written permission from the HO to authorize treatment. Within the hour the HO called back after seeing they had missed calls. The pup had surgery and follow up to the tune of $5400, which the HO’s put on their credit card. This was a 3 month sit so we had to take him back for aftercare, staple removal, etc. Happy to say that he fully recovered from this ordeal. Luckily we had the means to cover the deposit, but not everyone does. The clinic refunded the deposit amount after I reached the HOs.
Valuable lessons learned. We never take a house sit without vet arrangements and potential payment set up by the HO in advance. We always obtain written permission from the HO authorizing us to make treatment decisions if they are unavailable.
For THS to require house sitters to pay vet costs up front, and seek reimbursement from the HO later is absolutely ludicrous!
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I had announced in this thread that I wrote in the “About” section of my profile that I do not regard myself to be bound by those clauses.
No action has been taken against me (so far). Not even a request to remove that.
@Knowmad You took a risk there. No way that I would put up a $1400 deposit for seeing a vet. For an HO that I barely knew. In a foreign country where I do not know the legal system.
@pietkuip so what exactly would you do?
This dog was their “everything”, so I knew they were good for the money. They had an account set up at the regular vet but that didn’t help in this emergency situation.
@Knowmad I don’t know. For amounts like over $5000 I am not even sure that I could pay with my card without talking with my bank. At office hours in Western Europe. I never tried.
I am not sure that all my HOs would have reimbursed me, or that they would have been prepared to spend that kind of money.
I probably would let the vet take the risk of not getting paid. Their risk of doing business.