 Welcome back everybody or welcome if you are here for the first time. Today I want to share with you my experience with trusted house sitters and my first house sit which was incredible earlier this year. So I'm gonna share with you how the whole thing works in case it's something that you are interested in and I will also share with you some lessons learned from my experience. If you are hearing about trusted house sitters for the first time here it's simply a website or a platform that connects house and pet owners with house sitters from around the world. So someone with a house and pet they need somebody to take care of their pets and then a house sitter who is willing to travel to take care of their pets and the exchange is you take care of someone's pet house in exchange of free accommodation. There are opportunities from all over the world and there are so many reasons why using trusted house sitters to help with some of your travels is good. It's mostly helpful for budget travelers solo travelers and really just to help somebody and show love to their pets. Now in order for you to start navigating some of these trusted house sits you will have to have a membership and so they have three types of memberships on this website. There are memberships for owners, sitters and then there are combined memberships if you want to be an owner and a sitter at the same time and so for each one of them there are different tiers. So I'm just going to talk about the sitter tier. They have three different tiers for house sitters. They have basic sitter, standard sitter and premium sitter. The very basic one, $129 a year. The standard sitter $169 a year and then the premium sitter $259 a year and so each of these tiers come with different perks. The very basic one you get access to unlimited houses worldwide and then you've got the free background check while for the standard sitter this is one that I have. I will by the way leave the link to the memberships in the first comment so you can go and read through but the reason why I personally chose standard sitter is because it comes with a dedicated member support and then you can have access to a vet if anything goes wrong, if the pet is in distress which I personally needed because I didn't really have a lot of experience caring for pets. I didn't grow up around pets which I made very clear to the house and pet owners but I wanted to make sure that I have that line or that person to reach out to if necessary but anyway so these are the three different tiers for house sitters. I do have a discount of 25% which is a great deal. You can use the link. I'm going to leave it in the first comments as well and so you will get a decent price if you are considering joining trusted house sitters. Once you have a membership you will have to create your profile and so your profile on trusted house sitters is more like your LinkedIn profile because with every house sit you will have to apply and then the pet owner house owner will go into your profile to get to know you, read about what you are interested in, read reviews about you from other pets and house owners and so you want to make sure that you are really particular with putting together a solid profile so you want to talk about yourself, things that interest you but mostly you want to focus on your experience caring for pets and I have a pro tip for you when you are choosing your photos for your profile because you probably have more than like five six photos to choose. Make sure that you have some photos highlighting your experience with pets whether it's your own pet or your friend's pet just to show that relationship that you have with other pets which is a nice to have. The other important things are reviews but the problem with reviews is when you're getting started you're not going to have any reviews on your profile and for a specific house set if there are two people applying one of them has five reviews the other one doesn't have any review it's a little bit hard to to choose them but there is a solution for that you can ask for external references whether it's from friends or family or anyone that you helped in the past to care for their pets you can send them a customizable link from trusted house sitters they can write a review externally and then that review is going to be displayed on your profile which is great so that's exactly what I did I sent some of these links to some of my friends with pets that I helped in the past and so the review will be displayed on profile and that is going to increase your chances of being picked once when you submit an application. Now that you have your membership your profile you can go in and browse house sits from around the world and then if you see anything that matches with what you're interested in your destination destination that you're traveling to then you can apply and then when you are applying I would say don't send a generic message to all of the pets and house owners try to make it feel a little bit more personal make sure that you are reading through their house sit you understand how many pets you're going to take care of what are their expectations and so just make that message feel a little bit more personal which will definitely help. On trusted house sitters there are all type of pets that you can imagine so you can be taken care of cats horses chickens dogs rabbits there are all type of pets that you can imagine and so if you have experience with any particular area maybe you had a horse growing up or you have experienced riding horses and taking care of horses you want to make sure that you highlight that in your profile as well and then once you apply you hear back from your host they're good to go you're good to go your house sit is confirmed now at this stage you can get a manual or you can request a manual from the house and pet owner where they can send you more details about their house their pets so that you familiarize yourself with it so with my first house sit which was in Idaho it was just so incredible during winter we loved the family that we met so what we did was we got all of that information I read through I asked them all of the questions that I have via the messaging system in trusted house sitters and then traveled to Idaho I met them the night before they helped us with accommodation the night before and then we got to meet the pets familiarize ourselves with them ask all the questions about how many meals a day I want I asked questions to become familiar with the personalities of all of the three dogs because it was three dogs I felt more comfortable having that face-to-face interaction with the with the host which was really helpful but they were just so incredible so rather than looking at it just like an exchange of getting free accommodation to travel you really get to build these meaningful relationships with people and pets which is just very nice and then you can so for example our host they gave us a walkthrough of their house they showed us like the garage we asked them questions about things that we can use and they kindly offered us to use their snowshoes the cross country skis which was really nice like one of my favorite memories from this house it was taking the dogs out and snowshoeing all together it was just so wonderful I would say it's important to make sure that you are open and honest and you are communicating with the the pet owners as you go if you have any concerns or something feels off which for me personally because I didn't have a lot of experience with pets I was a little bit nervous if I see this that one of the pets is not is not feeling well not looking well I would really get nervous but I had my husband with me so he was more knowledgeable when it comes to handling pets and I was by the way open and honest with the pet owners telling them that hey I didn't really grow up with pets I don't have a lot of experience with pets but I'm going to give it my best I'm going to ask questions and then I've got Alex with me so he's going to be helpful and they were very very very nice and understanding yeah so this is the this is how it works it's pretty simple overall I had a positive experience there weren't really any hiccups if there's anything that I could have done better it would probably be choosing a house sit with less pets because taking care of three pets for first time house sit was a little bit demanding so we want to make sure that they are being walked regularly and then with three pets and snow on the road it wasn't very easy so maybe I would say like if you're doing this for the first time go with one pet or two at max one nice thing that we did I think this is just a nice to do when we were taking care of the pets on a daily basis at the end of the day Alex actually kept a journal what he where he would write about what we did that day we walk the dogs we went snowshoeing he would say like how many meals they had one of the pets was not doing well because some some of the pets they have separation issues like the first day they wouldn't eat so we took detail like Alex took detailed notes every single day and then we left them on the fridge this way when the pet owners are back they get to to see what what their babies were up to which was really nice anyway so this was my experience with trusted house sitters if you guys have any questions let me know in the comments and if you found this video to be useful give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel this is Habiba from the trekking palace and I will see you soon on a new adventure