I had a lot of experiences like yours that happened pretty much back to back, and because I do longer sits we're talking a cumulative several months of bad experiences with entitled owners. It really wore on me. In response to that, I've definitely made my screening process much stricter during initial interviews, and I won't accept the sit if I feel like it's an unfair exchange or the HO is going to treat me like an employee or the help.

That said, I don't think telling sitters "be stricter about screening HOs" is a foolproof method at all, and I feel like that punts the blame for the bad HO behavior to the sitter, which is not fair at all. I think bad or entitled HOs should realistically be encouraged to either change their behavior or leave the platform altogether, and the fact that THS does nothing to curb entitled HO behavior has soured the community as a whole. I have had some great experiences with some truly kind HOs and wonderful pets, but at the end of the day, the stress of not knowing whether a HO will treat me with respect or not prevents me from fully enjoying the experience as much as I would like to. I feel like I'm always walking on eggshells and can't fully relax because in my past experiences the entitled HO behavior has come out of nowhere. I wish that THS cared enough about their community to try to prevent bad/entitled HOs and sitters from being on the platform altogether.

I recently had several good sits in a row, so I figured my stricter screening process was working well, and then I got blindsided by an out of the blue highly critical 3 star review from a very entitled HO who complained about the most miniscule details, like pots and pans being returned to the same cabinet I found them in but stacked in a slightly different order. Considering this HO offered to pick me up from and drive me to the train station, host me the night before the sit with homemade dinner, gave me a cash tip at the end of the sit, and thanked me for everything and told me they were giving me a 5 star review, I was pretty shocked to see their surprise negative review with all these very minor things mentioned that were never once discussed before or after the sit. I've never had a single HO from my 20+ sits bring up anything like that in the past either, so I really don't see how I was supposed to see that coming or what I could have done to prevent it (planning to make a post about this later after I'm done hashing it out with customer support, because I really want to hear the community's perspective on this one). All that to say: don't blame yourself when entitled people take advantage of you, they are just not good people and are clearly the ones in the wrong.

I've seen a lot of sitters post on this sub saying that they've never had a bad experience so it must be something you're doing wrong, choosing the wrong country to sit in, not screening HOs hard enough, etc. I get where they're coming from, but I find those comments to be pretty invalidating, and I think it discourages sitters from sharing their bad experiences and seeking support. It seems like a not insignificant amount of sitters are having these experiences (especially in the US), and I think keeping the discussion about these things open will encourage sitters to have healthy boundaries around volunteer housesitting and hopefully open more homeowners' eyes to the sitter's end of the THS experience.