When leaving scores for the sub categories (organized/clean & tidy/reliable/etc), this should be averaged out. As an owner and sitter on the platform who meets people face to face I don’t want to rate/comment on their cleanliness or communication skills if I’m possibly going to meet them again and of course they have all my contact and private information now to contact me after the fact with hurt feelings. And we can check how owners/sitters score these things through their profiles, and if I see either side has a knack for being overly picky about one of these categories, I generally pass on that person even though that person may in fact be doing us all a favor. But with the way the system works I just don’t care to risk my profile for someone who leaves a 4 on some sub category on multiple sitters without explanation. The solution to this I’ve seen on other types of platforms is you can score these things but they come out as an average after 3 to 5 reviews, so they aren’t linked to individuals. There you get to the truth and you can leave it blank if you wish if you don’t want to contribute to the average.
And I dont understand why sitters cannot rank home owners on sub categories either. I’ve had multiple experiences as a sitter where the house was very untidy or even a health hazard (mice, ticks, mold, etc) and nobody wanted to admit it in the reviews. Also I feel a sitter should be able to somehow grade a location. For example I’ve done a house sit where the home was literally in the middle of a chaotic wet market by day and late at night there were people on every corner offering “bedroom” services. The home itself was perfectly fine and the owners were honestly incredible and so were the dogs but ya imagine how stressful it is to need to take dogs out daily into a very dense and chaotic wet market full of god knows what on the ground, giant slabs of meat hanging on the backs of trucks every morning, and you would rather not walk the dogs after dark because weirdos are crawling all over the neighborhood because of the after hours illicit services.
I honestly would still do that house sit again because despite that block being awful, the owners and pets are awesome and only 3 blocks of walking and you’re away from that mess and in a beautiful city. However my wife won’t do it again, she felt very exhausted with the situation the entire time. So, people should know what they are getting into with that type of location and the owners didn’t say anything about it in their profile other than it’s “colorful and eclectic” in their description. Owners (including us) don’t generally send exact addresses until just a few days beforehand so we can’t streetview situations like this. Even if I give some private feedback to the owners and tell them they should mention all the cow carcasseson meat hooks and night time workers, I know that’s obviously not going to happen. So someway of sitters being able to lable location anonymously in a sub category would help others but in extreme cases I think somehow private 1 line observations or pre-available options that can be left and seen under one of those categories would help.
I’m not sure how the anonymity adds value to the system but as to your last point the overall written review can carry a wealth of information to both warn future sitters and potentially educate home owners. We had a sit last year where the dogs kept escaping through the fence and chasing bike riders we mentioned this in the review as the sitter could have been legally liable if the dogs caused damage. Looking at more recent reviews it’s seems the HO didn’t rectify the situation but at least the sitters had a heads up.
Think about a website like Glassdoor. You get way more honest reviews because of anonymity. Sure, people like you exist and don’t care about being straightforward, but evidence shows thats not the majority. Unless you were the very first sitter ever, you likely were affected by the lack of courage of other sitters before you to flag this because they were too worried to mention that because it comes with potential complications, even with double blind system. I’m mentioning this because I am familiar with websites (p2p car rental, private teachers) I’ve used where the subcategory part is specifically the anonymous part and that’s where you can see more accuracy about what you’re going to deal with. All of my negative house sits and sitters had multiple positive reviews and usually only one person would very vaguely alude to a problem, but never direct, and I rarely see direct feedback on issues.
I generally agree with the idea that the review system isn’t doing what it needs to do. At the moment the review system is a major part of vetting for both sides. While the blind reviews have helped, there is still a culture where both sides are afraid of being called out as “petty” for mentioning some stuff and/or are afraid they will never get another sitter or another sit if they appear “harsh.”
Here are some things that would help:
- Reviews do not need to be public squabbles. It would be great if profiles and listings were only viewable by paid members but at the very least the reviews and responses should not be available publicly.
- There should be some guidelines from THS about important stuff to include in reviews including important negative stuff so it isn’t just about rating reliability for instance subjectively but more an answer to a question: Did the sitter show up within the agreed upon time range? If not, did they offer an acceptable explanation for the delay?
- While sitters can look for a pattern of missed reviews for homeowners to help them vet, homeowners cannot see missed reviews for sitters. This needs to change so that homeowners can at least ask sitters about any missing reviews.
- As a homeowner, I recently started to get these weird “How did we do” surveys after sits that ask for ratings but it looks more like the data will only be used to boost the company’s satisfaction ratings and it doesn’t help assess a particular sitter’s performance. IMO for both sitters and homeowners there should be a more comprehensive survey after every sit and the data should be used for troublesitting. For instance, if the data uncovers that the country home while not completely infested does have ants and spiders not mentioned in many reviews, but mentioned frequently in the surveys, the homeowner should be told to include information about that on their listing if not take further action.
I know that a lot of sitters have had very bad experiences in homes. The outcome of a bad sit can be even worse for homeowners since it can lead to property damage and/or loss of a pet. THS is a matching site, but if it is to scale up it will need to offer more security to sitters that they won’t have an awful experience and more assurance to homeowners that they won’t come back to a preventable tragedy. This means that the company has to do more to help sitters and homeowners vet each other and it also has to play more of a role in vetting members and enforcing it’s own TOC.
Sitters do rate HO in sub-categories, one of which is cleanliness. There is also a sub-category for accuracy of listing which you could deduct stars for the HO who neglected to disclose living near a wet market.
I’m not sure anonymity works well in this case, as people tend to get unnecessarily nasty if they can hide themselves. If you don’t want to talk to a sitter or HO you e left a poor review for, then block them. Yes they know where you live but I don’t think they are going to fly or take the long drive back out and knock on my door. Maybe with a local sitter, that could be a valid concern but my sitters have not been local.
I dont know why but I don’t see any subcategories mentioned on any house owners reviews. Only the written review and the one general score
Maybe they are older reviews, before they were using the subcategories, but recent ones do have them.
Here are the sub categories of our recent sitter’s review of us…there is also an overall star category at the top…
I get where you are coming from, but if scores were averaged, it wouldn’t be anonymous at all. Because almost every home owner has written our review the following day after leaving, we would know if someone down-scored us, because our scores would change, and wouldn’t change again until after the next sit had ended, which could be 2 weeks later or 4 weeks later. We’ve got 5 stars in all our reviews, so we’d know straight away which HO it was.
The review system is only as good as both sides writing the review. Some things are relatively simple, was the listing accurate? Was the pet behaviour as described? Clean? That’s a whole other can of worms. I have a few friends with much clearer homes than mine. I have a few with dirtier. So I guess my standards are kind of in the middle. And you also have to allow for culture and climate. Cockroaches in the tropics, fairly normal, in a different climate not so much. It’s never gonna be foolproof.
As employees working for a multinational company in Europe we had yearly employee performance reviews. The score was 1 to 5. If you had done what you were supposed to do you only go a 3. if you when beyond the requirements for the job, you got a 4. If someone dared to give a 5, that raised serious questions of higher up. You were not supposed to give or get a 5. Because the message of a 5 was basically that this person was so much overperforming that he/she needed to be promoted immediately. At the beginning there was a lot of resistance, because all staff found intuitively that 3 was bad, they did their job good so they should get a 5. But the logic was that a 3 meant there is some room for the employee to improve, learn new skils. That was then described in the comments
Why I am saying this is that the interpretation on THS of 5 stars is interpreted by almost everyone as “this is OK” as in "nothing to improve. The cause is obvious because before the current system everyone was already giving more or less by default 5 stars. And as far as I know, there are no review guidelines explaining what the number of stars is supposed to mean. I want to give 4 stars mostly and like to explain then what the other party could improve. Because if you really think it through there almost always is something. it needs to be formulated in a positive way of course.
Please let me know your thoughts on this
Sitters are not employees and hosts aren’t employers. This is not the workplace and, as far as I’m concerned, the comparison you make isn’t a valid one as the sitter/host relationship is supposedly based on a mutual exchange. I’m not a great fan of the star system but realise that, in spite of its flaws, it can act as a guideline. For me, the real “meat” of the review, is in the feedback received and given. It’s the part of the profile that most interests me and best indicates whether the match might be a good one
@markhellemans I am not an employee and don’t have any type of parallel ‘career’ goals when pet sitting. As a volunteer, I commit to respect the owner’s home, keep it secure, and give loving care to their pet. I absorb and follow the details within the Welcome Guide.
My goal is to have the owner return to their home without any worries or concerns and feel pleased that their pet is healthy and happy. Given I’ve then met the requirements set out in the listing and Welcome Guide, I feel I’ve earned the 5-star rating. Should a sitter fail in any of those areas, then perhaps a lower rating, with a fair explanation, may be warranted.
I have yet to have less than 5 stars for the sits I’ve done. However, I am extremely selective in which sits I apply for, or accept. On a video call, I use many ways of determining if we have a similar understanding of the concept and I think I might sense that we would not be a good match. That’s OK too.
