We’ve used trusted house sitters for coming up a year now; and most surf have been great. Normally young city folk live in small flats and who can’t have dogs/don’t have time to have dogs.
We live in a nice village in Yorkshire, detached home with large gardens, big king size bed for sitters, large kitchen diner and living room - you get the gist. We Airbnb our spare room sometimes, so stuff is of a decent standard etc.
We have chow chows so often meet the sitter before they start the sit as they’re guard dogs and there is a way of “introducing” the dogs. We felt something was off with this sitter - didn’t seem to ask questions about our dog and kept asking about our hot tub. My husband had said no simply because it takes 2h to heat up and we had already locked the log store plus all the cleaning we’d have to do after someone has been. 10 mins later he then asks me “if I want to use the hot tub how do I use it”, and I said look, it has not been cleaned and takes ages to heat up plus even we don’t use it on a whim. I didn’t realise the earlier conversation until I asked my husband (I was on a call when he arrived).
In our guide we specifically said dogs to be walked first thing and in the evening BEFORE meals and provided them with lots of naps and images of where to walk the dogs.
We have a ring camera that is fully disclosed on the app, and there is only one entrance and exit.
We check the app now and again on holiday because after all, they are strangers living in your home.
We thought it was odd at 6pm we hadn’t received notification of them going out for a walk, 8pm, nothing again, 9pm again nothing. We had sent a couple of messages to check with the sitter but he had not read them.
Come 9:30pm we had enough and started to drive home because he was clearly taking the mick and given earlier conversations my gut felt he wasn’t going to take proper care of my dogs and I didn’t trust him.
We rocked up at 1;30am and demanded them to leave. He claimed that the dogs looked tired and didn’t think they needed walking and was going to text me THE NEXT DAY to ask about it. I said in the briefing if there was anything at all just call us or text us through the app and we will let them know… it just seemed like a pretty lazy and really bad excuse.
When I got back, my dog wanted to go for a walk and dragged me up to his nearest toilet hill (I had to run to keep up) and lo and behold, one big wee and a poop.
Chow chows are creatures of habit - they have a schedule and they get upset with large variations.
I also saw a disturbing video of him pointing aggressively at my other dog when he returned from his town trip which made her back off.
I mean, if you don’t like dogs, why on earth would you sign up? I’m tempted to leave THS now; but the rest of the sitters have been amazing and they’ve all enjoyed being in our home and loved the chows!