Etiquette on booking timing/meet and greet etc?

The cardinal rule of most sitters is to never accept a booking without a meet and greet first it will cause more problems to deal with especially if the dog or the client doesn't work for you and your home situation.

Your profile shows Kathleen can host up to 3 dogs per night, so I’m not sure why you are trying to juggle the multiple booking requests for the same dates, maybe you should rethink this to only taking one client/dog at a time until you get more experienced. I wish you best of luck

I never accept a booking with a new client until AFTER I have had a M&G, so it only makes sense to schedule them as soon as possible after the request comes in. Once you've discussed everything and you think their dog would be a good fit, then you would formally accept it. It is true that the client has a certain amount of time to finalize it. If the time expires, well, the booking can always be resurrected. However, you should never consider yourself as being booked unless the client has paid. Do not hold dates open. If they want you, then they'll pay for it.

If you receive another request for that same time and the first client hasn't paid, then you should let them know that you cannot hold it open for them and that someone else has requested your services. Give them 24 hours to finalize and, if they don't, then proceed with the next.

I personally don't wait on anyone, whoever confirms/pays first gets booked with me.

This is business and you decide how you like to run your business.

I cancel all meets and greets with potential clients if they disclose they are having multiple meets and greets. I just don't have time to entertain these people, and this policy works good for me.

Majority of people will confirm after a meet and greet, so if you schedule your meet an greet for 10 days later, the request will expire and then you may get a request for similar days and you have to decide which one you want to accept. I don't believe there would be any set etiquette when it comes to your business.

Good luck :)

I always do a meet and greet ASAP. Over the holidays, I had a few occasions of having to choose one person over the other and went with the first one to book. I chose the second person once just because I liked them more and had a great feeling about it. The other owners also took almost two weeks to do a meet while the second person set it up within days and even took off work early. It's totally up to you how to choose. It's your business and you are taking care of the dog(s) and dealing with the owner so just because someone was first doesn't mean you automatically have to give them preference

I agree with other answers, and want to add, Be direct advise the folks what you want/need them to do.

Send the PC (Potential Client) a note stating something like, “PC, I need confirmation in the Rover app before I am able to do the meet and greet.,”

When I am not getting the faster responses, I usually ask the PC, have you used the rover app before? Usually they haven’t and are not that comfortable working with it. I had one PC state, “this app hates me!” I laughed gently and explained that they app didn’t hate her, she just thinks differently that it does.

When things just get mucky on the app (and I have seen some doozies) you can always say to folks, Well the rover app can be a bit of a pain sometimes - so lets see if we can figure this out. 3/4 of my potential clients ran into trouble with the app - and just didn’t understand what it wanted.

When I don’t hear back from someone in 24 hours, I archive the message. - That opens the slots back up in your schedule.