Hey everyone. We have done a couple of sits and have decided its not for us. We want to cancel our membership. However, we have left a couple of reviews for the homeowners we did sit for, and wanted to know if these reviews will remain on their profiles once we leave. Both hosts were great and I would like them to have the reviews availble for other potential sitters.
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Sorry to hear you are cancelling your membership @PoppyandSmudge I get that sitting isnât always right for everyone.
Yes, the reviews you left for the homeowners will remain on their profile, you will just show on their reviews as a âpast sitter" and the dates you sat.
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@PoppyandSmudge It depends! If you just stop renewing and let your membership lapse then the reviews will remain. You would be just be a currently inactive member. But if you cancel formally and ask THS to delete your profile completely then any written reviews will be removed as well. We, as sitters, have experienced this. Fortunately I screenshot our reviews as we go so havenât lost any. But I occasionally look back on our reviews and we have 3 or 4 where the owners obviously cancelled completely. In these cases âFormer Memberâ is written in place of a name. All the Stars are still there (very important!) but the written bit is gone. A very good reason to screen shot your reviews! You could tell your previous hosts to do that then they could, if they wish, include your great review in their profile itself.
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Thank you! Thats good. I would hate for the hosts to have had a disandvantage, both were new to the platform, so we were their first reviews.
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Ah, so the written part goes, thats a shame. I suppose we could just let our membership lapse. Shame we cant just cease membership without deleting everythingâŚ
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@PoppyandSmudge @Lokstar has said it correctly also. You CAN just cease your membership without doing anything else. Just make sure auto renew is turned off and everything will just still show until your current membership expires. No real need to cancel and have your history deleted it you donât want to, just leave it lapse. Even though you wonât have access to anything on your profile and wonât be an active member, if you decide to rejoin say in two years time, everything will still be on your profile as it is now, everything. THS will hold all your reviews, profile, everything for two years and some have said itâs even been longer. The only real reason you would request for all of your information and personal information to be completely deleted would be for whatever personal reasons you may have. For myself, I couldnât care about not deleting it all, I have nothing to hide or concerns about anything to do with my membership.
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Our membership doesnât lapse until June, so my initial thought was to just cancel membership as we wonât be using it. No other reason.
So if we cancel before membership lapses, everything goes, but if it just runs out at the end and we donât renew, everything stays in the background.
Interesting.
Ok we may just leave it to run out then. My main concern was not doing the hosts out of their reviews.
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Good plan, just remember to make sure auto renew is not switched on. Hope that our info resolves your dilemma, Iâm sure it will 
x
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3 of the sits we did were for HOs no longer on the site, Iâd be very sad if theyâd removed their written reviews. On another note, I just realised that of the 4 references listed before I started sitting, two of those people have since died and it says to please contact them if needed 
When you cancel auto renewal, they will automatically offer two options:
- to accept a 20% discount and keep auto renewal on.
- To let the membership lapse for three months and you will be able to keep all the information on your profile. In this case, they will automatically charge you the full fee three months after the pause, sending a reminder 30 days before.
If you donât choose either of those options, they threaten with deleting all the information. I donât know if this is new or itâs just a message that pops up in order to keep as many members as they can.
@BonnyinBrighton Thatâs why itâs good to screenshot all those hard earned reviews as they come in. Weâve had 3 hosts cancel membership and delete all info. Only the stars remain. The first had not given a review (wierd host who cancelled her account soon after the sit) so I didnât realise the written review gets removed until the other two cancelled and theirs disappeared. Fortunately Iâd already started screenshotting before that so we havenât lost those two reviews completely.
I actually donât understand why THS canât just delete the actual profile info only. Why is it necessary to remove all the reviews that have been sent out in the world and are on other peoples accounts as well?!! Why canât they separate those two issues? @Mark_B a question to forward on please. It seems very unfair to hosts/sitters to lose reviews just because someone cancels membership!
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Hi @lokstar,
Good question!
If someone simply ends their membership, that doesnât affect reviews.
Where it can change is if someone asks us to delete their personal data: free-text reviews can include identifying details, so we remove the written content to respect that request and reduce the risk of retaining personal data.
We do retain the star rating in a non-identifying way, so the overall rating history isnât lost.
Jenny 
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Thanks Jenny
Just to clarify - I canât cancel my membership before the end date without my personal data being deleted? Iâm not asking for my personal data to be deleted- Ideally I want to cancel early but keep my data.
@PoppyandSmudge If you donât plan to get your data deleted there is really no need to formally cancel your membership early. You can just let it run its course and let it lapse. You wonât get any refund for the remaining months anyway.
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Just wanted to add something to this conversation that I donât see mentioned much on the forum. Thereâs an important distinction between two different GDPR rights that gets confused a lot in these discussions.
A Subject Access Request (SAR) lets you request a complete copy of all the data a company holds about you â your reviews, your profile information, dates, ratings, everything â in a portable format. This is your right under GDPR Article 15 and it doesnât delete anything. Youâre just getting your own copy.
A deletion request (Article 17) is different â thatâs where you ask them to remove your data, which is what causes the written reviews to disappear from other peopleâs profiles as Jenny described.
The important bit: you can do the first without ever doing the second. So if you want to preserve your complete review history â not as screenshots that anyone could fake, but as actual data from the platform â you can submit a SAR to privacy@trustedhousesitters.com before you let your membership lapse. They have 30 days to respond. The data you get back is yours to keep regardless of what happens to your membership afterwards.
I went through this process recently myself and it was straightforward, though it did take close to the full 30 days. Worth doing if youâve built up a review history you want to keep a verified record of.
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You can ask the hosts to send you a link where you can leave a reference. Start your reference with âwe are former users, but as we decided to end sitting, here are our reviews. We visited [dates]â or such. They get to keep the review in a way, and you get to keep your data safe.