Pets make our lives richer. They give us comfort and companionship, and when we’re away from home, they miss us.

If you love to travel, though, having pets can feel like a burden. Who’s going to take care of them as well as you do? Not just feeding and keeping them safe, but playing with them, snuggling, helping them feel they haven’t been abandoned by “their person?”

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And then there’s the expense. If you want to get away for a couple of weeks, you have two dogs and live in a major city, a doggie daycare could run you $1,000 or more. Even cat care can add a few hundred to the cost of your trip.

My husband, Dave, and I are pet-free these days, and it’s been liberating. We enjoy traveling together (when I’m not on a NextTribe trip). Hotels can be fun, but since he’s also in the travel business and has had hotel clients, staying in a hotel can feel like “work.” We’ve had mixed experiences with AirBnBs, so a couple of years ago when we were still in LA and he had scheduled some meetings in the Bay Area, I suggested we try to book a pet sit.

How Pet-Sitting Vacations Work

Five years earlier, I’d set up a profile on Trusted HouseSitters, an online marketplace for sitters and homeowners with pets. I’d applied for sits in Barcelona, London, and Mexico City but either the owners didn’t respond, the timing wasn’t right, or they weren’t prepared to take a chance on someone who didn’t yet have reviews on the platform. It reminded me of applying for my first job as a college student: They wanted someone with experience, but I needed a job to get experience! I had given up but kept my profile active and paid the $149 membership fee every year. The annual fee for pet parents is the same..

Founded in the UK 2010, the Trusted HouseSitters platform reports they have 240,000 members globally, 60% are sitters, 40% are “pet parents.” Sitters can now “shop” by dates, by location, by type of pet and filter by other sitters’ reviews of the experience.

Pet parents can shop for sitters by reading their profiles and reviews. Profiles can include prior sitting experience off the platform, but homeowners seem to appreciate the checking that the platform does, including background checks for U.S. sitters, and ID checks for all others. And you can also add LinkedIn and AirBnB reviews.

My Very First Pet-Sitting Vacation

That was enough for Elaine Sigal in Los Altos, a veteran of the platform, to give us a chance at our first Trusted HouseSitters experience. Elaine is what I’d call a “power user” of Trusted Housesitters. Over the years, she told me, she’s saved over $75,000 since before the pandemic, using the site to find sitters for her two (adorable) dogs, Harper and Bentley. “In five-plus years, we have only had one sitter to whom I would not give a 5-star rating,” Elaine says.

But…but…but what about having strangers in your beautiful house, surrounded by your gorgeous things? As she said, in all those years, she’s only had one bad experience and that was just a cranky person who left a negative review, not a thief. Her advice to pet parents who might consider the service: “Be thoughtful of your expectations;  set them high, and be very clear with your potential sitters. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement, so be sure to treat your sitters as you would like to be treated–with respect!!  I ask every sitter when he/she leaves what I could have done differently to help them with their stay. I have incorporated all the suggestions into my ‘guidelines’ manual.”

We loved sitting for Harper and Bentley (for Elaine and her huband). It’s the “trust economy.” Sitters take care of pets, and they don’t get paid,in exchange for a (in this case, beautiful) place to stay.

We sat for the Sigals a couple of times and now consider them friends. We also spent a week in a beautiful home in Santa Fe taking care of a little dog for a woman who went to Japan on a shopping trip for her local boutique.

New Places, New Pets

Off the platform, we’ve had our share of pet-sitting vacations. We spent several weeks taking care of a cat on Kauai and later sitting for a woman across the street on the island while she was traveling for a week of Pickleball tournaments. These came through Dave’s friend Nancy, a realtor on the island.

Last year Nancy asked us if we wanted to take care of a dog at an off-the-grid cacao farm near Kilauea. (Did somebody say chocolate?) We didn’t want to turn it down, but the timing didn’t work for us, so I referred her to NextTribe’s Travel Manager, Marcy Mitchell. After a Zoom intro with the farm owners, Marcy flew over and spent two weeks in balmy weather, taking the dog to the beach every afternoon. The only downside was our Monday NextTribe team calls were at 3:30AM local time!

With my encouragement (and my discount code!) Marcy joined Trusted Housesitters and spent the Christmas holidays last year on a pet-sitting vacation, taking care of a dog in Sun Valley, Idaho. As I write this, she is on her way to take care of a dog in Amsterdam for two weeks, after spending a week in a small town outside of Oxford, England.

Read more: The Giving Trip: Traveling to Support a Friend

The Pet-Sitting Lifestyle

I follow a retired woman on TikTok who pet sits around the world, sometimes for pay. She doesn’t own or rent a home. She just travels from sit to sit, staying with family or friends during her down time. More and more women are discovering this way to travel, and more women who travel are discovering new ways to leave their pets without breaking the bank.

Think about it: Could pet-sitting vacations be the ticket to your next travel adventure? And if you want to come on a trip with NextTribe, think about Trusted Housesitters. Maybe Marcy can be your sitter!