Sittercity Review

Wednesday, December 4th

2024 Pet Sitter Service Reviews

Sittercity

• Free to use
• Full range of pet types
• "A+” rating and accreditation from the BBB

Sittercity presents itself as an online care service that aims to address the challenges faced by parents in balancing child care responsibilities with their desire for adult leisure time. The company offers adult care as well as care for children with special needs. And, of course, they have a section of the site just for pet care. While Sittercity's primary focus is on childcare, the pet section offers care for a full variety of pets and is completely free to use and browse.

Frustrating user experience

Despite the well-designed and seemingly legitimate website, the experience of searching for a pet sitter on Sittercity may lead to a different perception. To get started on the site you either have to choose a specific city, which is a limited list, or start searching by state. Instead of limiting the options with filters, the state search just shows you an alphabetical list of every single pet sitter available in that state. This is an extremely frustrating process as there's no way to determine the location of these pet sitters from this particular list. It makes it almost impossible to easily search for a pet sitter.

Only see listings when searching by city

If you search by city, this is a little easier and it does navigate to a list of sitters with some filters. However, the only city near our test location was over three hours away, which didn't show us sitters close enough to the target city to get a good result. While there is a field to fill in your zip code, you can only get this after clicking on one of the other cities available in the main list, which could be confusing for users looking for their local city.

Full range of pets

For the pet types, Sittercity has an impressive range of options. There are over 20 pages of individual sitters to browse through. And, on top of the expected dog and cat care, you can select options for:

• Birds
• Horses
• Farm animals
• Reptiles/amphibians
• Exotic pets
• Small mammals
• Other

Additionally, you can limit the listed options by whether or not sitters have had a full background check, by hourly rate, or by how many years of experience a sitter has. This does make the service stand out over other options that only offer dogs and cats. However, it's not quite enough to rank this site higher than 2.5 stars.

High BBB rating, but low customer reviews

Unfortunately, while we appreciate the different types of animals that can be cared for through Sittercity, the user ratings aren't positive overall. On third-party review sites like the BBB and Sitejabber, Sittercity only has an average rating of 1.3 stars out of 5. Customers complain about low levels of interaction from sitters that they query for services. Further, customers complained that trying to get Sittercity customer service to help them resolve problems was almost impossible. Overall, customers are frustrated and dissatisfied with the level of customer service provided. The only bright spot in the company's reputation is that they are rated "A+” by the BBB with accreditation. However, with a high volume of poor reviews, Sittercity isn't a top pick by any means.

Not worth the hassle

Given Sittercity's business practices, the disappointing customer service approach, and the clunky site navigation, it is advisable to explore alternative websites, particularly those with higher ratings and a more customer-centric approach. While the company does offer a full range of pet-related services as well as other in-home care services, these benefits aren't enough to counter the poor reviews and difficulty finding pet sitters on the website itself. Look at some of the higher-rated options in our review before exploring Sittercity.