We have always avoided doing long trips due to our cat Sophie. We don’t like to leave her alone for more than two days because she misses us too much when we are gone. However, we had a great trip ahead and needed a solution, our friends or relatives weren’t available. So I researched a way to get a pet sitter for our cat and I found Rover. This is my experience using this service, and I hope it will help you if you decide to use one of their services for your cat.
My Impression When Using Rover’s Interface
I found the website easy to navigate, it takes you right away to a form to choose the service you need. You can select Boarding, House Sitting, or Drop-In Visits. Boarding allows your pet to stay in the sitter’s house, while with the House Sitting the sitter stays in your house taking care of your pet. Finally, the Drop-In Visits as the name says, allow the sitter to go to your house according to a schedule booked by you.
How You Contact A Pet Sitter with Rover
Every pet sitter has a rating based on 5 stars with the number of reviews. They also have a “Contact” button to message them, but you need to fill out the form to be able to send a message. This schedule is called a “request”. You can’t communicate directly with a pet sitter if you don’t fill out the form with a pet sitting request. Once you do this, there’s a message section where you can talk to her or him and you can also communicate through a phone number assigned to the pet sitter by Rover. If both parties agree with the request the pet owner books the schedule and pays it. Then you can keep communicating with the pet sitter about all the details needed for the service, such as a meet and greet with the pet sitter and your pet, previous to the pet sitting period.
My Experience When I Booked with Rover Pet Sitting Service
Here I detail my experience step by step of using the services of Rover for my cat through their website.
The Service I Requested in Rover
When I chose what type of service I would need from Rover I decided on the Drop-In Visit. The main reason is that cats are much less stressed when they are taken care of in their environment. According to Pam Johnson-Bennett, the most popular and sought-after cat behavior expert in the world who starred in the Animal Planet UK series Psycho Kitty, a cat “remains the most comfortable in his own surroundings. It’s bad enough that from his point of view the family has run off and disappeared without warning but at least kitty hasn’t lost territory”. I know how comfortable Sophie is in her home and that’s why I decided to request a Drop-In Visit for her.
My Journey with Rover Service Requesting Drop-In Service
What I went through using the services of Rover for my cat. These events are in chronological order and I am being as objective as possible in the description of them. I changed the names of the pet sitters for obvious reasons.
My first pet sitter: Amanda
In the beginning, I didn’t get very well how the service was set up. So I made a request and contacted a pet sitter, I won’t mention her name so I will call her Amanda. As no answer came out after two days and I was offered to book the request I thought I had to book it. When I clicked on “book it now” I realized this meant paying the visits, so I did. This is my fault because I was not very clear on how things worked. In my defense, as I didn’t hear from the pet sitter after two days I thought I needed to go a step further to contact her. Consider that this was my very first time hiring a pet sitter online. After I called her and got no response, I sent her a message which she answered the next day. To my surprise, she said she was not working in Rover anymore and that she informed this but somehow they didn’t update it. To make a long story short she had to do some stuff for me to receive my money back.
My second try: Elizabeth
After my failed booking I contacted let’s call her Elizabeth. I sent her a message and she responded right away saying she would call me back that same evening. Well.. that didn’t happen. So I waited until the next day and I called her. She said she was having dinner and that she would call me after. Hours passed and she didn’t call me back.
My third try: Kimberly
At this point, I was getting nervous if I was going to get a pet sitter so I called Rover customer service. The lady on the phone was very nice, so she did some digging and hooked me up with Kimberly. With Kimberly, things went smoothly and I booked the visit schedule with her. We agreed on the day and time for her to visit us for a greeting and meet to see how things would go with my cat. She mentioned briefly that she was pregnant but I didn’t give much thought to it. When she visited our home, we noticed her pregnancy was more advanced than what we thought so my hubby asked her if she was close to labor. She said that her time was about a month away. We made sure not to ask her for any activity in which she would need to lean over or anything. Fortunately, my cat uses the Litter-Robot 4 and the Feeder Robot, so Kimberly only needed to give our cat love and companionship for three days and play a little bit with her using a string. So we gave Kimberly our keys and she left.
The day of the trip
About three hours before our trip Kimberly sent me a message saying she was in labor and she couldn’t show up to visit my cat! I don’t blame her, I blame myself for believing she wasn’t going to have the baby during the next 10 days. What can I say? We had to leave our cat alone or cancel the trip. The second option was not an option so we simply set up two cameras in the house to check on her. Fortunately, things went well as this was not a long trip. I don’t want to imagine if the trip was much longer or if we didn’t have the Litter Robot. After several days I waited for Kimberly to send me the keys and it took a while before getting our keys back. I didn’t mind as I understood she maybe couldn’t arrange this sooner.
Pros and Cons of Using Rover Pet Sitting Services (my experience)
Even though my experience in general was not ideal, I made a list of the advantages and disadvantages of using Rover pet-sitting services for your cat.
PROS
- Easy to use the interface
- Many options for scheduling to get your cat taken care of.
- You can see the rating of each pet sitter to see how good they are.
- A very convenient service is the Drop-In option for cat owners.
- No issues when refunding money.
CONS
- You can’t directly ask questions to a pet sitter without making a request.
- The pet sitter availability is not 100% updated in the system.
- You may have to wait until the pet sitter decides when to contact you back.
- Not a reliable service for booking a pet sitter with a short beforehand.
- There’s not much availability of pet sitters in less populated areas.
- There’s more offer to pet sitting dogs than cats.
My Conclusion Using Rover Pet Sitting Service
According to my experience if you are going to leave your cat alone for over 3 or 4 days I would try to create a plan B in case the pet sitter fails to show up. What happened to us shouldn’t happen to anybody and maybe it was just bad luck, which could happen if you think about the chain of success that went wrong with my experience. Still, I suggest getting a backup plan. I don’t even want to imagine if we had planned to leave Sophie alone for 10 days. This happened last year and I was not going to make this review. I know Rover may help other pet owners as I saw great reviews with some pet sitters. However, I still decided to make this review in case somebody is unlucky like me, so he or she won’t end up having to leave their cat alone for numerous days, which is the worst thing that could happen to any loving cat owner.
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