If the sitter has a friendly pet and wants to be a sitter for the HO, does that happen or is it not acceptable?
This has been discussed a lot on the forum, and there are people who seem to do this successfully. But understandably, most hosts probably aren’t okay with introducing a new animal into the home, especially when their pet is already going to be in a new situation with a stranger in the house and its owners gone.
No matter how friendly your pets are, having animals share the same space for extended periods–rather than some short meeting of a few hours–can be unpredictable, and most aren’t going to want to take the risk.
There is no option for hosts to mark their sit as ‘pet-friendly’ and the vast majority are not going to address this issue in their listing–I imagine for most people, this is not a scenario that would occur to them.
So for most of the sits you may want to apply to, you will have no idea whether they are open to this arrangement, and most of them probably won’t be.
This will mean a higher rejection to acceptance ratio than someone who is traveling without their own animals. So long as you are okay with the possibility of needing to apply to more sits to increase your chances, you’ll probably find someone willing to take you on.
Yes, sitters are allowed to apply for sits with a ‘friendly pet’ (specifically, dogs. I’m not sure what other animals they could realistically travel with). It is also at the home owner’s discretion whether or not this would be a suitable arrangement for their particular sit.
Some hosts note in their listing description that they’ll take sitters’ pets or not. When I’ve seen that, it’s mostly not. You can’t filter for such, because there’s no such filter.
There are many threads about sitting with pets — click the magnifying glass to search. For example, within the past couple of days or so, a sitter started a thread to ask who was responsible for them getting their hand hurt while pulling a sit dog off her own dog during a sit.