Trusted House Sitters

Phone line auto-hangs up on you and "live chat" is a bot that offers you to send team an email. The automated email response says "it is taking a number of days for us to reply". It does not cost $150+ per year per user to host a website and this business cannot even provide timely customer service so not sure what they are collecting the fee for.

Cool house sitting idea, poor execution. (Our sitter just cancelled last minute since it wouldn't be "ideal" for them to come anymore and I can't even leave the review/note on their profile to warn other hosts.)

Watch out, they will steal your money. They do not provide refunds like they mentioned. I signed up for 1 sit that I needed, and did not find a sitter or get any applications. I asked for a refund (this was only after 3 days) and they refused to give me a refund. You unfortunately can't use the website at all without signing up, and be careful... once you sign up there is no going back even if you don't find anyone. So you are giving them free money. Extremely disappointed with the service and with their customer service side of things. They were rude and unhelpful in their emails.

If you're a homeowner I'm sure this is an excellent service - skip boarding costs and take your pick of eager-to-please animal-lovers offering to take care of your pets. As a sitter, however, I think it's pretty obscene that you have to pay for the honour of trying to sell yourself (as the site recommends, "tell them why you'd be perfect for this sit!") to dozens of homeowners only to be declined, days to weeks later, without any communication or basic acknowledgment that you, a human being, took time over your message and might have plans of your own to think about. Bottom line is there are way more sitters than there are homes, and the entire system operates on the unpaid labour of people who can't afford to pay for private accommodation. Sitters should not be charged, or, at the very least, should be refunded having tried the service if they have not secured a sit.

We have used TH house/pet sitters three time in the last year and have been very lucky to have had responsible, clean and caring sitters. Using their website and app is another story. Both are extremely non-intuitive and often take you to screens that have nothing to do with what you intended. They both look like they were written by someone who was starting their first job out of tech school. It is so bad, that we had a person contact us about when to come to sit a month after we had rejected them since we had already accepted someone else. This was very embarrassing for both parties. Other reviewers have shared their horror stories about bad sitters and so far we have been lucky. We will probably continue to use the service when Virus passes and people can travel again.

I entirely understand that TrustedHouseSitters can't be responsible for the behaviour of the sitter, but we had an absolute nightmare. Items were missing from our house (nothing valuable, but small towels, tea cloths, etc.), she had used up a huge jar of expensive honey and a lot of chocolate, the house was filthy, and she also ran up a massive electricity bill - apparently she had visitors there using our washing machine / dryer. She seemed fine when we met her, had a professional LinkedIn profile - the only good thing that I can say is that our cat and dog were fine. However, we will never use this site again - we can't risk it.

When things work well this is a workable platform, however, home and pet owners be warned, when things go wrong Trustedhousesitters policies are concerning and leave homeowners at risk. My recent house sitter made alterations to my home, displayed unstable, disrespectful and paranoid behaviour, refused to leave when asked, and stole cash from my home. This was all clearly evident through the 60+ text messages she bombarded me within a ten day period. I reported it to Trustedhousesitters and although they investigated and acknowledged what had occurred, they refused to bar her from the platform and continue to promote her. This is a serious risk to other home and pet owners. It demonstrates a real lack of appropriate followthrough after an incident has taken place. They are basically allowing daylight robbery to take place. Shame on them.

We had very positive and wonderful interactions with our sitter! Hopefully we will be as lucky to find other sitters, if our lady cannot accommodate us to watch over our pets. I have read some of the reviews, and yes it is quite scary if you have made plans and a "no show" happens. We would certainly be mortified! There should be an area that you could go to on the site and let others know of this person who does a "no show". I am sorry to those of you who have had that bad experience.

We've had three sitters stay at our home and care for our two dogs. I've been satisfied with the sitters and ensure that our communication is clear and consistent before I leave on vacation. I appreciate having someone at the house so the dogs don't have to be boarded. However, there may be occasions where the sitter has to cancel. Although this hasn't happened to me, I am prepared to have them go to a kennel if there are problems before, or during our vacation.