Stephen went above and beyond my expectations. Our little dog had never barked at or growled at anyone that had ever watched him. But for some reason he did growl at Stephen. He was still able to manage to take care of our pup and make sure he got fed and taken outside when needed. I will definitely utilize Stephen again if he will have our little dog.

My husband and I booked a wonderful vacation down in the Smoky Mountains, but found that we had no one to take care of our wonderful furry family. We considered a "Pet Palace," but truly wanted to keep them in their home environment, so after reading some reviews, we decided that Rover.com was a great alternative. After reading reviews of some of the local Rover.com professionals, we decided to give Stephen G. a try for a couple of reasons. We saw that he had a "not so good" review from someone, but that tore at our heart strings, because not everyone is fair and he looked like a young man trying to do a good thing and make a few bucks. We wanted to give him a chance and we love to build people up and give sparkling reviews, so we went for Stephen, although there was another caregiver that had much better reviews. We have two furry family members (cats) that needed food, watering and maybe a freshening up of litter a couple of times during the 9 days we were supposed to be gone. We didn't have a huge list of items, we just needed simple help. My husband met with Stephen briefly and gave him the simple instructions. We are very easy-going people and just appreciated someone to take care of this for us so we could vacation with no worry. We returned one day early from our vacation (my son was homesick and we were too, lol). When we opened the door, our apartment (that NEVER smells like cats, because we keep it very clean and fresh), smelled like a urinal. All the empty wet food containers that Stephen opened for our cats (single servings) with the tin-foil lids were laying on the counter and some of the foil was stuck to the counters... HE COULDN'T WALK TEN FEET TO THROW THEM IN THE WASTE BASKET! The kitchen smelled due to the containers not being thrown away. There was dry cat food all over the floor around the cat's dishes and the litter had not been changed or freshened up all week. The new container of litter that we purchased and showed Stephen where it was located, was still completely full. The litter box was so full that I felt sorry that our cats had to get in the mountain of poo to use their box. Our apartment smelled so horrible. We were sad that we spent the money for our animals to be disrespected as well as money wasted. We so much wanted to give Stephen a glowing review. We are doing a private feedback to give him a chance to do a better job the next time, so we are doing him a favor, but we truly deserved better. We were planning on giving him a really nice tip when when we got back (even though we live in an apartment, we are far from being poor people), but after seeing the empty containers laying on the counter, cat food all over the floor, a mountain of poo in their box and the apartment smelling horrible, we simply couldn't leave him the additional money. We gave Stephen a chance, because we wanted to be the ones to leave a review that would make others not hesitate to give him a chance, but instead, we were sad that we didn't go with another caregiver who would have treated our furry friends better while we were enjoying our vacation.