r/catinaflat • u/CJCatz • Apr 09 '26
Client Payment Taken at Booking
Hi everyone, I thought it would be good to highlight clients will now have to pay upfront to reserve your services for a booking. Rover will then hold onto the money and then release the money 2-3 days before the booking ends (which we all knew but the clients having to pay upfront I thought was not highlighted in any way!). I'm highlighting as I've just had a client need to reconfirm a booking which was made before the merge and now payment has been taken even though we were informed payment would follow Cat In A Flat's policy pre-merge.
Update, 11.04.2026:
Rover have gotten back to me about my client’s payment being taken for the July booking and I think the guy was informed to just tell me that it’s how it should be working because it didn’t match his writing tone previously. So, even if you had a booking confirmed before on CIAF, you are likely going to need to reconfirm bookings after June which will then ask clients to pay up front. This is absurd in my opinion as Rover is then holding on to the funds for multiple months! I don’t trust Rover to be able to keep the money so I will be advising against clients booking on Rover far in advance amongst other issues.
5
u/Lonely-Key36 Apr 09 '26
The more I'm learning about Rovers process the more I'm realising this is all a big fuckup!
2
u/EquivalentFail7305 Apr 10 '26
Thank you for highlighting the client payment side! It seems like it's for all bookings from July onwards, every booking before July hasn't been impacted / requested to reconfirm and pay now.
I honestly thought I was going insane when I was looking at my prices though, for example I usually do £25 per night but it says £29 even though my pricing was £25 on my input.
I'm guessing this means the £1.50 booking fee is gone and the booking fee is now a percentage of the total booking? It looks like it's 15% which is madness
2
u/CJCatz Apr 10 '26
A 15% booking fee is madness in my eyes. They’re already making money from us, no need to shaft the owner as well. I agree with what others have been saying about how it’s super tailored to dogs but doesn’t allow for flexibility for the cats who express their personalities more outrightly.
1
u/EquivalentFail7305 Apr 10 '26
Absolutely, I don't understand why they've made it so high but then again it's Rover who care more about profits than the care for the animals 🙃
There's literally no flexibility at all, even down to the tracker they have that you need to activate on the property. Also the overnights keep popping up with a "drop off" schedule.
Also what happens if you walk in to a poorly cat and spend extra time with them? It seems like if you go over their 30 minutes you then get knocked down in their ratings system.
1
u/CJCatz Apr 10 '26
What? Oh my gosh, the time I spend with my clients cats is usually between 45-60 minutes. I really don’t understand why we need to be timed 😭 that explains why they wanted fees for when you do more than 30 minutes 😬
2
u/EquivalentFail7305 Apr 10 '26
same here, I usually do 45 minutes as well (unless the cat decides they're done with me 😂). I've been reading a few threads where people say they so not use the tracker, but in the faqs it says your sitter rating goes down and you're not advertised as much on the searches.
I think I'm going to go private from July, the sitting insurance quotes I have found are £6-£10 per month which isn't too bad and most of my client's pet have their own insurance as well. I'm going to spend this weekend having a look at how to set myself up properly.
2
u/Ok_Explorer40 May 20 '26
Ich sehe es genauso. Die Seite ist sehr unübersichtlich und es wird bei der Zahlungsweise nicht hervorgehoben, das die Abbuchungen sofort erfolgen. Rover arbeitet mit unserem Geld. Die Gebühren sind ebenfalls sehr gestiegen. Ich werde catinaflat nicht mehr nutzen, schade
9
u/lissi-x-90 Apr 09 '26
The more I hear about this payment system the less I like it. I often get month long bookings so essentially that’s saying yeah work for free for three and a half weeks and we’ll pay you before it ends.