We have been members for almost a decade. This term, our membership will expire during our upcoming sit. After that, we want to take an extended break from housesitting. It appears that we have to sign up for an entire year just to cover the end of our sit.
While trying to see if shorter memberships were available, I noticed that there is a three month membership available to OWNERS but not to sitters!
The subject of unequal review processes has been dealt with in other threads. This latest discovery is yet another inequality between the services offered to owners and those offered to sitters. Why is THS so biased in favour of owners???
@Gretch - we have also been sitters for over a decade and because of all the recent changes are thinking about taking a break. I removed the auto renewal option and was very confused by the message I got. See screenshot below.
I will be taking up my questions with Membership Support and report back.
Firstly the renewal cost of £79.20. I am unsure if I am classed as Legacy, Basic or Classic but as far as I know a renewal would be at least £99?
I will lose access to my a/c, reviews and messages. Fair enough but I expect my reviews to show again if I renew within 2 years.
Dedicated membership support? This is no longer available to any member.
No access to Accident and 3rd party insurance protection. This is not available anyway on my membership level.
Hello Twitcher,
THS doesn’t allow us to remove the auto payment because we’ll be doing a sit at the time that our membership expires. We’d have to cancel the sit first.
I’m a sitter, but I can sort-of understand THS on that front. If someone with pets uses THS they will realise how great it is and likely renew, whereas if someone was sitting, they may have just wanted to do it for a one-off holiday, which isn’t what THS is about. It get’s rid of the flakey sitters who solely want a free holiday, rather than an exchange of goodness.
It’ll need to remain in the T&C until the small number of members with this type of account cancel, but once there’s no active 3-month memberships left, the team will remove any mention of it.
I can see why someone seeing it in the T&C might be confused though, so it’s good we’ve had a chance to clarify here.
Jenny
Just for context, here’s what I posted in the thread I linked to:
It turns out that we used to offer 3-month plans, but they haven’t been available for sitters or owners since 2020.
We have a very small number of members with active 3-month plans, which is why the terms and conditions reference that.
I’ve fed back to the team about how the mention of 3-month memberships in the contract details could be confusing, and I expect this is something that would be updated when no further active 3-month memberships exist.
Hope this helps! If you need any further information, reach out to Membership Services and they’ll be happy to help you.
Members who chose to auto-renew will have been kept on the same price that they signed up to. If they choose to cancel their subscription, and wanted to re-join at a later time, they would then have to choose an annual membership.
Why don’t you contact the HO and explain it to them. Maybe they could edit the dates online for you? So, part of the dates are under THS and part you’d be doing outside of THS. If I were a HO I would do that.
Thanks for the suggestion, Peg. All of this wouldn’t be necessary if THS were just a bit more flexible. THS has put so many restrictions onto membership - all while increasing the fees quite substantially - that we’re really not sure whether we would renew anyhow, even if we didn’t want a break.
oh that sounds harsh and not right. I haven’t seen anything about taking a break and how it works but would definitely take that up with the customer service. Would like to hear how you get on.
Karin
Hi @deeventer , I can’t see exactly which post your are responding to. You need to click on Reply directly below the individual post for your post to be linked as a response. If you are responding to the entire topic, click on the big green reply button at the bottom of the thread.
Are you referring to communication via the THS email app? Yes, since you’ve already established a connection with an owner, you will be able to message them now and in the future, regardless of any dates they post.
