Are sitters supposed to mark themselves as available when they aren't? I've contacted several that show available to find out they actually aren't. This make searching for someone much more time consuming and difficult.
I'm not sure if this might be the problem, but time and time again I have encountered a glitch where someone has booked with me and those days will automatically be blocked out as "unavailable" but then weeks later I will check back and they are now unblocked as "available." I have even checked my calendar to make sure those dates booked are blocked out once booked to be sure the Rover software is working properly and the glitch will happen months later after a booking. I have heard of other pet sitters experiencing the same thing. This may be what is happening or you may just have a sitter not keeping their calendar up to date.
I try really, really hard to keep my calendar up to date. Unfortunately, I do occasionally slip and have a few days lag between booking a client and editing my calendar. It's really painful for me when a client requests the time that is "available", but actually booked. Only a few instances of this and editing my calendar became more of a priority! Maybe that's what's happening for you?
As sitters, we are not supposed to mark ourselves "Available" when we're not.
If you're dealing with new sitters, they may not be aware that they can manually set themselves to unavailable. I apologize for your troubles. Occasionally I will forget to change my status if I'm going to be out of town, but I do try and keep my calendar up to date.
The Rover calendar is not compatible with touch screens. As a travelling sitter, I'm not home alot. I do most of my communicating over my phone and tablet which are both touchscreens. This is a big problem for my availablity since I hardly ever have the oppurtunity to update my calender. Hopefully, the calender will be more user friendly in the future.
The answer may very well be the sitter updates and decreases the space numbers every time there is a booking or reservation for that time range so they can refer to it when requests come in. The pet parent viewing rovers contact the sitter omits space numbers entirely and the person searching will see a green blank area denoting it the sitter is available. A reduction from the max amount of space numbers available on the sitters calendar should let the person searching know that that their dog may have to overlap with another dog during that time and range eliminate the difficult and time consuming process.