TrustedHousesitters Reviews

You are charged 130 dollars up front for an app that has serious user issues. Not easily navigated or easy to narrow responses by country or area. Unable to see the accounts/reviews of those who responded to my house sit. You are unable to close your account on your own you must go back an instead delete all of your information and wait to hear back from an email request to cancel your account. The only support number is UK based yet their app is world wide. Once I declined a sitter I was then messaged by them to house sitter to explain why I declined them.

I signed up to be a petsitter because I love animals, but if you’re in the US be very careful. All the general inequities and exploitations of the culture are replicated here. I ended up caring for two not potty trained dogs for four days in an uncomfortable apartment on a high floor when the elevators were broken. Because I cared about the dogs, I wanted to see it through, but it was truly awful. Another house essentially asked me to be there while they had part of the house remodeled after I’d agreed to be there to care for the pets. People will take advantage of you. A few mellow cats in exchange for staying in a town you want to be in seems fair, but my experience on this site was that many animal and home owners are using the site for free labor. I was incredibly disappointed and closed my account.

Overall TrustedHousesitters itself is alright, I guess. Could have more filters and be more user friendly but given the little care the company shows for its users, I think that may be asking too much. If you’re a potential sitter consider this: you’ll be VASTLY outnumbered per sits available, vastly. For most sits that would be worth the time and energy, there’s so many applications that often, they don’t even reply to you. Most want experience, so if you’re new, good luck finding a sit! And if you have a pet of your own, forget it! I applied to sits without a pet and never got a sit and now with a dog of my own, its months later and I still haven’t been able to land a sit. Contacted the company and was basically told to “keep trying!” The $100 and thirty something bucks they charge for this is ludicrous given how little service they provide for the sitters. Sitters are pawns, just know that. There’s gotta be a better alternative to this company!

The trusted housesitters app is very clunky, disorganized, and unfriendly to use. I have been a member of the site for over two years and am constantly having troubles getting notifications in TrustedHousesitters , streamlining my welcome guide, finding ways to review my previous sitters without having to go through an email reminder, etc. etc. Feels like a very early app circa2012 that was being created from the website but never made it to a complete mobile version. Like I said, very clunky and not streamlined for navigating easily and clearly in mobile format.

This should be illegal. You did not make it clear that these are UNPAID jobs. This is literally volunteering. $0 AN HOUR PAY. THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN MADE CLEAR TO EVERYONE THAT THEY ARE PAYING $120 A YEAR TO MAKE $0!!!! NO TIPS! Not even traveling fees are covered. No compensation for mileage either. Ridiculous. Even a DOG WALKER off Rover makes money. How does forcing me to pay $120 a year to watch OTHER PEOPLE’S pets make any sense?? To make matters worse I cannot get a refund even though I just signed up yesterday JUST Because I already applied to a “job”. Ridiculous. These are not real jobs. This is just access to someone’s house in exchange for pet sitting/taking care of their home. MAKE THAT CLEAR AS DAY NEXT TIME

Mapping locations is a total buggy pain and the messaging portion is AWFUL. No auto correct, the caps will turn on and you’ll have to unclick it for every letter. Don’t bother clicking on pictures to be able to see them bigger or to zoom because it’ll just open a blank photo page.
I love THS but TrustedHousesitters needs real help. (I’ve seen replies from the company saying they don’t have bug reports. THAT is a huge issue too because they’ve been happening since day one. You should know about these things through automated reports.)
ANYWHO Also, an idea—create a saved draft for applications (for us users who use the same template for our all applications?)

Help and Support should have a link for app feedback since TrustedHousesitters is so brand new. I read all the reviews and you keep asking for us to contact you, but neither is there a link to email you, nor is there a link to rate TrustedHousesitters , nor is there a way to provide direct feedback. Getting redirected to the website is counterintuitive.
My first experience with TrustedHousesitters was today. You sent me multiple emails and placed popups on the website that TrustedHousesitters is Apple friendly, I say you’re missing key components. Even as I type this review, I can relax again with my auto-capitalize settings and my ability to let my keyboard predict the word I want to use. I can double tap space bar for a period and all “I” ‘s are autocorrected to be capitalized. Maybe a different between UK and USA, but if you’re Apple friendly, let the auto’s work. Also when typing a response I can see about 4-5 words at a time....when I text someone, my text box grows as I type and when I need to review what I’m responding to, I can scroll up and see more while my phone auto-condenses my typing box to about the size of your normal default typing box.
If you truly value our feedback, make TrustedHousesitters more user friendly.

The website is glitchy, so I was looking forward to TrustedHousesitters . Unfortunately, TrustedHousesitters has problems as well.

1) I don’t see a way to sort the results of a saved search. So it sends me an alert that new listings meet my criteria, but then I have to manually go through all results to find which ones are new.

2) I created a search with limited date parameters - begin and end dates. The results include all sits that begin within the stated timeframe, but not all of them end by the requested end date. Why am I putting in an end date and then that date is ignored?

3) The search results using the map are glitchy. First the positive - the new map provider is much faster and more responsive than what was previously used on the website. That said, sometimes when I click on the map button to see results on a map, it goes to a full-screen map and other times to a half-screen map with results thumbnails below the map. More importantly, it’s not a map of the results, it’s a map of my current location. The performance is not consistent, as sometimes I can get it to show search results on a map.

I love this app and have used it to find many house sits over the past couple of years. But this review is for TrustedHousesitters , and TrustedHousesitters still needs work.

We’ve had some great fun dog- and house-sitting using the TrustedHousesitters. The concept is fantastic, particularly considering how expensive it is to board an animal or rent lodging these days!! The main difficulty we have with TrustedHousesitters is the need to search every post every day to be sure we find the sits we need. We just want to sit in the US and just in the Western Mountain states and we want LONG sits (3-4 weeks),but the filters don’t allow us the ability to continually search specific towns in specific states for specific time periods. It would be great if our daily “feeds” only had our interests in them. And adding spellcheck to application requests and entries would help since typing with thumbs does not always produce the greatest text!!

This goes for both TrustedHousesitters , mobile, and desktop sites: inbox/message handling is TERRIBLE. Actions don’t sync across platforms, you can’t select a message without opening it or select multiple messages to perform one action, and you can’t delete messages, only archive. I don’t want all of the 80+ applications I receive for a house sit archived. You cannot archive messages from non-active members on the desktop site, only TrustedHousesitters . I also want to be able to hide a sit from previous sitters even if I gave them a good review, for my own reasons. Website and app are mildly infuriating. I’d like an option to select non-automatic renewals. If you cancel automatic renewals, you cancel your membership, so you’re a hostage. I appreciate that I’ve always found quality sitters on this site, but it’s not an ideal service or app.

I was quite excited at the prospect of having an app for this app. However, the last few times I have tried to use it either with my iPad or iPhone it has been very glitchy. As I prefer to use the microphone for entering text it didn’t work at all which was quite frustrating. Even when I was trying to manually enter text to respond to an invite the text window would not open sufficiently for me to see more than two words at a time and TrustedHousesitters would not rotate on my iPad to make viewing easier, instead it either had a quarter screen view or two times magnification view, neither of which were useful. My other pet peeve is with the daily emails to notify me of the latest house sits as soon as I click to start looking at them a pop up appears suggesting I go to TrustedHousesitters . Even when I close it out it pops up again which is really frustrating. When I open TrustedHousesitters it doesn’t retain my login credentials so I have to do it each time, would prefer a fingerprint option or the choice to retain my login credentials so I don’t have to enter them each time.

Not sure what the other reviewers are complaining about! Searching by location, date, and duration works fine. TrustedHousesitters is a little sensitive to touch and registers clicks sometimes when I mean to swipe (hence 4 stars), but I’m sure that will be fixed in later updates. Otherwise it works fine. It is also easy to navigate and view. The design is clean and uncluttered.

I really appreciate that TH has come out with a phone app, and I’m sure the push notifications for my saved searches are going to come in super handy. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time!

(Also lol @ the person who downrated this for being a paid service. TH is a great service and worth the money, and the yearly fee has nothing to do with whether TrustedHousesitters is good or not.)

The current version of the TH app for iPad is a good start toward supporting a very valuable organization/service. TrustedHousesitters occasionally shows partial pictures of host’s pets (ie: heads cropped off). It is cumbersome to navigate between different fields within the host database (can’t move between fields without backing up a level).
Most irritating of all (and probably not related to TrustedHousesitters ) is the steady stream of email I receive announcing a sit that is a perfect match for me; then listing sits are not even on the same continent that I am interested in visiting. Then when one clicks for details the link takes one to a page encouraging one to JOIN TH. Duh, I’m already a member. What would be nice would be matches that fit the filters set in my saved searches.
I’m certainly not criticizing TH which is a great service, but TrustedHousesitters can certainly be improved.

It has only to do with TrustedHousesitters . TH in general gets 5 stars in my book. I would like to go to Avalon on Catalina Island. Opportunities don’t come up often. I thought by saving the search I’d be first to know. Instead I get several emails per day saying Avalon but in reality they are all over Los Angeles. I haven’t figured out a way to narrow the search. Hence too many midnight alerts for LA gigs. Otherwise TrustedHousesitters is helpful on my phone. On my IPad I prefer to peruse the site.

I really like having access to TrustedHousesitters while traveling. It’s so much easier than trying to log into the full site on my tiny phone screen! TrustedHousesitters makes it easy to quickly look up house sit information and message hosts, especially when on the move. I’ve done quite a few house sits with trusted house sitters and TrustedHousesitters definitely makes staying in touch more convenient. Just a heads up: trusted house sitters is a paid service. If you aren’t signed up for an annual subscription, you won’t be able to apply for anything. You can still browse all the fun listings though 😊

Well I haven’t really traveled the world, but technically you could. Mostly I stay on the West Coast. This is my way of traveling and staying in someone’s house for free while I explore and get the company of some cute animals. I’m a serious cat lover and love to make new cat friends. The only hard part is when I depart I get really sad because I probably won’t see them ( the pet) again. As I write this, I’m 100 feet from the Skagit River in northern Washington looking for bald eagles.

Anyone that rates TrustedHousesitters or community poorly has obviously not put any effort into using it or being a part of it. TrustedHousitters is an incredible community that is growing and improving every day. TrustedHousesitters is a true testament of that, with consistent improvements with messaging, layout, etc. I have no problem applying to sits and consistently communicating with home owners through TrustedHousesitters. I look forward to further improvements and personalization! :)

I almost didn’t download it because of the reviews but happy I did. I finally set alerts for certain places which I don’t think you can do on the website like you could in the past! It’s been great, in my opinion, so much better than the website itself. Easy to navigate, set alerts, and navigate through listings. Would recommend!

I have been a member for several years and can highly recommend it. You save the cost of the annual membership in just one sit in an area you always wanted to visit. Free lodging and taking care of a variety of pets makes a vacation all the more memorable. Glad we have an app now to make it even easier to find a book my next adventure with furry and feathered friends!

We’ve been enjoying Trusted Housesitters for some years now, and in addition to making some wonderful friends, our travels are always care-free: happy cat, mail filtered, sidewalks shoveled, home protected, and the occasional photo of our favorite view of the sunset from our window at home.