Pawshake - Dog & Pet Sitter

In theory this is a great app. In practice, our second ever sitter ended up having a psychotic break, sending over 400 extremely vile racist, homophobic and generally insane texts in the span of an evening. She wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t show us a picture of our dog to show she was ok, and started talking about human sacrifice, so We had to organize an emergency pick up at midnight in the middle of our vacation. Needless to say it ruined our trip. We reported the profile and Pawshake suspended it briefly. But less than a month later we went back on the app and saw the exact same profile was active again. What’s worse, they wouldn’t let us leave a review to warn others, and didn’t even respond when we emailed them to complain. There are plenty of great dog sitters on Pawshake. But there are also racist, mentally unstable people that the app knowingly allows to watch your pets. So my best advice is be careful.

This service is really great and convenient, and the app is mostly solid and does a pretty good job for the scheduling, reservation, and payment experience. The chats and notifications, though, are annoyingly quirky. They’re getting better (e.g. these features are more reliable than they were - at some point I was using SMS for with sitters instead of the app because it was so unpredictable - and they now support emojis) but 1) the messages thread in a strange way and default to the “not booked yet” outdated messages, and 2) they erratically notify you of messages on your profile page, where it makes no sense. It’s too bad the chat threading isn’t better (just by person is probably fine, like SMS’s, rather than by reservation!), because it’s where I spend 80% of my in-app time and it’s super annoying, but it’s still a great service overall.

We had some bad luck with boarding our animals, and traveling anywhere over night was something we had to plan out months in advance for our pets. Pawshake has changed my life, I can travel worry free, book last minute, and most of all our pets are calm and happy when we arrive back. Absolutely amazing service every time!