Strengthening Trust Across Our Community

The TrustedHousesitters community works because it’s built on mutual trust between members. Pet parents open their homes, and sitters step in with care. As we grow, we want to strengthen trust and safety for all our members, by focusing on how people connect, make choices, and show up.

How we’re strengthening trust and safety at TrustedHousesitters at a glance

Helping members make more informed choices by increasing site visibility, such as testing a new app feature that displays a sitter's past pet-related experience at a glance.
Creating clearer accountability by setting clearer community expectations, such as introducing a tool for sitters to cancel a sit directly via the app or website.
Giving members more support when something feels wrong by streamlining how members get help, such as adding a private recommendation question to the review flow to flag issues directly to the team.
Strengthening systems behind the scenes by upgrading core platform security, such as raising the minimum operating system (OS) requirements for Android and iOS devices.

Our ongoing commitment to building trust

Over the coming months, members will start to see a series of improvements designed to raise the standard of trust across our community. We plan to share what we’re working on right here in this blog to keep you in the loop.

Rather than a single update or a one-time launch, this is an ongoing commitment to make our platform feel clearer, fairer, more dependable, and better supported over time.

Helping members make more informed choices

We want to give our community the tools to make decisions with confidence. So, we’re introducing stronger signals and better visibility across the TrustedHousesitters site and app.

We plan to make it easier for pet parents to make a considered decision around the suitability of a sitter, by showing relevant past pet-related experience at a glance. This will be a beta in the app to start with as we work out how we can improve and grow the feature.

When a feature is labelled as ‘beta’ it means it’s an early version that we’re using to test how members react and use it.

Creating clearer accountability

Accountability is what you should expect from a growing community. We are bringing more consistency and clearer expectations for both pet parents and sitters to ensure fairness across the entire community.

When someone cancels at the last minute, the impact can be huge for travel, pets, accommodation, cost and stress. That’s why we’re looking at improvements such as cancellation deterrents, with the aim of making the experience feel fairer, clearer and more dependable for all.

To make things more consistent, we recently introduced the ability for sitters to cancel a sit directly on the website and app. Find out more in this blog post, Sitter cancellations: Everything you need to know

Giving members more support when something feels wrong

Unexpected issues can happen to the best of plans. We’re making sure that finding help is seamless, clear, and reassuring for all members.

We’ve been looking at creating a clearer way for logged-in members to report a concerning profile or listing via the TrustedHousesitters app and website, without needing to search for the right route into Membership Services (limited to 10 reports a day).

We’re also adding a new question at the end of the review flow so you can share if you would recommend the sitter or sit. Your answer will only be seen by the TrustedHousesitters team and won’t be shared with the other member directly. We’ll use this alongside other signals to help us spot patterns, understand concerns and keep standards high.
Strengthening systems behind the scenes

As we grow our community, we plan to strengthen the foundations that help keep TrustedHousesitters secure, reliable, and running smoothly.

We’re always working on updates to improve our member experience. To keep the app experience secure and reliable for our members, we’re updating the minimum operating system (OS) versions on Android and iOS mobile devices that are necessary to run our app. It won’t affect the majority of members but we’ve put together advice on how to check if your mobile device supports app updates and what to do next.

Raising standards isn't about removing the human side of the experience. It's about supporting it better. We'll continue sharing updates as this work evolves and as we introduce new ways to support trust across the community.