I think a lot of their functionalities (or the lack of them) are there by choice, as THS wants to appear more attractive and show more offer than there actually is. The broken search, the “instant” notifications, or getting sit reccomendation for full sits or sits that are overlapping your confirmed dates.
I also wonder about all the profiles under “sits not currently accepting applications” that haven’t had an active sit in several years (at least based on their reviews). Are these people really paying for their profiles for years without using them, or is THS dislaying old innactive profiles to look better. I sit in a reagion where there is very few hosts, so these make you wonder…
I think that marketing doesn’t help. Sitters join with the expectation that they will be able to use a working app and just secure sits from the very start. Which for some may work, but the wast majority will need to put in some work before, which can take several weeks or months, depending on your region and time you can invest into it.
Based on their recent decision regarding the fees, they again showed they value quantity over quality. So for them it’s actually not a benefit if you see the actual amount of suitable offer as a sitter. Neither is it a benefit for the company if a small number of experienced sitters books a lot of sits. Even if the hosts and pets are happy.
So while they like to blame things on “not being able to scale the solution” a lot of the improvements asked for, I think, are not being implemented on purpose. I may be cynical, but I don’t have much hope in this changing anytime soon. The opposite.
So in short, I don’t really see much improvement that was actually helpful to me in the past 1,5 years. It’s more that I have learned how to make the best out of it. And that was through trial and error and this forum. And I am talking actual posts from users, not company announcements.
It was a clunky awkward counter intuitive process and site when I joined and still is now 18 mths later. This is why on this forum and on various fb groups there’s a continuous stream of questions from newbies who can’t work out how to do things or have completely misunderstood how the process works. It’s a barrier you have to be helped to overcome and I’m sure many simply give up….
KChev, I agree cancellations need advanced warning if possible and advanced communication. But retaining cancellation functionality could’ve been maintained with proper product discovery techniques. They might have attached a text box to the functionality and made entering text a mandatory thing before the cancel button could be deployed or tracked complaints of last minute cancellations per user and published guidelines as to ‘if there are x cancellations with under x days notice in a 1 year period, platform rights will be suspended’. Instead, T.H. just decided “sitters can’t cancel”, which is frankly ridiculous and disrespectful to sitters. ; T.H. chopped off a hand rather than guided a finger.
It’s really a joke. I know this sounds very American, but I’m surprised there has been no class-action lawsuit against THS over its failure to deliver a product as advertised.
Good point. Will you start one? However, as is often commented on the forum, THS is purely an introductory service for owners to find sitters and vice versa.
A class action requires actual (financially) provable damages.
You could report them to gov’t watchdogs under consumer protection laws, but those laws allow significant enough wiggle that you’re not likely to get anywhere.
No. Ideally, neither side should be able to cancel with a click of a button with no explanation. A system like @BethMe describes would be great. But I don’t think it should be a frictionless process close to the time of the sit.
You definitely used to be able to see the whole previous correspondence when applying for a sit if you’d applied before. You can still scroll through your inbox and find that correspondence but it’s obviously a lot more convenient to have it there in front of you when you click to apply.
OK that’s interesting. Perhaps that was only on the website? Or pre 2018? I usually apply on the App and have never seen the previous dialogue till AFTER hitting Apply! But at least now they notify us of previous contact so we can go searching for it!
I used to be able to see all the previous correspondence with a host when clicking apply on the website. I rarely apply with the app and joined in 2019.
Surprise, surprise. (Maybe it’s been there all the time, but) I just discovered the ‘Accessible by public transport’ option under More Options. Very useful.
Interestingly, once I chose this option, 50% of the sits disappeared from my search.
This is not new. But it’s not always useful or used by the hosts correctly.
It depends on their definition of public transport.
I found that for many sits that had this set to “non accessible”, you could easily plan your journey there without a car. Sometimes these hosts also provide a car once you arrive there. So I stopped using it, as it’s actually filtering out too many sits.
Yes, quite right. As a city girl, I don’t quite take ‘not accessible by public transport’ at its face value but rather as an indication of its rural location, which I’d like to avoid.
IOW, ‘not accessible by public transport’ is, to me, a proxy for ‘rural’
A few years ago you could talk on phone to the customer service, now you hear an answering machine “ all our agents are busy”.
The chat on the app does not work.
The answers via mail take often several days…
We still ignore if sitters (or owners) have cancelled in the past owners ( or sitters).
Major improvements asked by members on this forum have not been made and will probably never be. ( calendar, notifications, similarity between app and web site). The 5 apps limit is still there in spite of huge critics
Some interesting things have vanished (classification of previous messages received : you could open a category -example-for “ mails unanswered” or “apps declined”)
Why when an owner leaves the platform, his/her reviews vanish , the descrption too, but the sit dates still appear in the sitter’s profile with the * he/she gave ?
Prices have increased ++ while the quality has lowered… If the company, in spite of a hard marketing ( insisting more on “ free holidays” than on love for animals) wastes money, there must be a reason…
Why do members still stay members ? Because the choice ( at least in Uk, and USA…) is still wider than on other platforms, reviews and feed backs can’t be deleted. Listings are more detailed and homes often nicer.
Exactly. I wuld have changed platform if there would be decent alternatives in my region. Even offers on THS are few here, alternatives have (close to) zero.
And they are aware of this being the case for many of their users.
