Hire A Pet Sitter — Your Pets Stay At Home Without Tying Down Your Home Exchange Partners
One great feature of home exchange is that you can “swap pets”. By that I mean each family’s pets stay at home to be taken care of by the exchange family vacationing in the home. Great, if you just have a cat that needs to be fed and maybe cleaned out once a day, but what if you have a dog? Is it really fair to expect your exchange partners to stay close enough to your home to be able to return once, maybe twice during the day to accommodate your dog’s toilet requirements?
For several years my husband and I have solved this dilemma by taking out a membership with a company called SitterCity. In marketing-speak, Sittercity.com is the largest and most trusted online source for child care, pet care, senior care, housekeeping and tutoring with more than a million caregiver profiles nationwide.
SitterCity is where you can go to find trustworthy babysitters, pet sitters, nannies and other care providers within a few miles of your city. In Dallas, for example, we’ve got more than 24,000 caregivers! Unlike smaller sites, they have hundreds of thousands of care providers across the country to make it easy to find the right sitter for your needs!
As I said earlier, my husband and I always use them when we are home exchanging. We insist upon our exchange partners having at least half of their days in our home free of the responsibility of caring for our collection of pets. If they ask for more, that’s fine too. The SitterCity pet sitter has a definite schedule of days set up and comes to the house twice or three times each day, depending upon how late at night our exchange partners expect to return.
We always provide them with the current sitter’s contact information so that they can get in touch with her should there ever be an emergency, or they will be away from the house longer than anticipated.
This worked out particularly well during our last exchange because it allowed our exchange partners to use our house as a base camp and take several overnight trips away.
But it gets even better. The Sittercity membership gives us access to their entire range of pet sitters, babysitters, nannies and other care providers. If the visiting family has children we can set them up with a baby sitter that we know will be reliable and are often skilled in areas like early childhood education, CPR, and first aid.
Sittercity is also less pricey than using a babysitting agency and lets you search for sitters in your area before you ever have to sign up for their service. That way you can be sure that there are sitters in your area whom you would like to contact before spending a dime.
Because Sittercity is a matchmaking service only, it does not charge any fees for using care providers found on the site! Just your monthly fee for use and you are ready!
