The short answer
A meet-and-greet first, booked from the website. Then visits or stays scheduled through Time To Pet, Pet Sitter Plus, Scout or Precise Petcare, with a visit report and photos sent to the owner each time.
The website books the meeting. The software runs everything after it. Sitters who try to make the website book the holiday itself end up with dates they cannot cover for animals they have never met.
Why the meet-and-greet has to come first
You are being given a key and an address. The owner is handing an animal to a stranger. Neither side should commit to ten days in December off the back of a web form.
Half an hour at the house settles what no form can. Whether the dog is comfortable with you. Whether the medication is straightforward. Where the litter, the food, the stopcock and the alarm panel are. Whether you can park. Whether you want the booking.
So the button on every page says "Book a meet-and-greet", the page says whether it is free, and the calendar offers the evenings and weekend mornings you can actually do.
What happens between the meeting and the visits
Four things, ideally before you leave the doorstep or the same evening:
The client and pet records are created in your software, with feeding, medication, vet practice, emergency contact and access details attached.
The dates are scheduled, so the owner can see them confirmed rather than hoping.
The service agreement is sent for signature, covering cancellation, emergency vet authority, key handling and photo permission.
The deposit, if you take one, is taken. Holiday periods are where sitters lose most money to cancellations, and a deposit changes behaviour without an argument.
How the visits themselves work
Each scheduled visit appears in your app. You check in on arrival, do the work, take a photo or two, write a couple of honest lines about how the animal was, and check out. The owner gets it on their phone, often before you have got back in the car.
That report is the product as much as the feeding is. An owner four hours into a flight to Spain is buying the message that says the cat ate, the tray is clean and the curtains are shut.
Time To Pet, Pet Sitter Plus, Scout and Precise Petcare all cover scheduling, client and pet profiles, visit reports with photos, and invoicing, with the details differing between them. Check the current feature list with the vendor before you commit, particularly around GPS check-ins and payment options in your country.
What the website has to do for this to work
Say the process in four steps on the home page, in plain words: meet, agree, we visit, you get a report every time.
Show a sample visit report. Not a description of one, an actual screenshot or a mocked-up example. Owners have no idea what they are buying until they see it, and it is the single most persuasive thing on a sitter's site.
State prices per visit type so the owner can cost the trip before they book anything.
Answer the trust questions on their own page: insurance, vetting, first aid, references, and how keys are handled.
Put the meet-and-greet button in the header, under the price table and on every area page.
Repeat bookings work differently
An existing client should not go through the meet-and-greet again. They message or use the client portal in your software, and you schedule.
Say that on the site. Something as short as "Already a client? Book your dates in the app" saves regulars from a form built for strangers, and it stops the holiday requests arriving as messages across four different platforms.
Where it usually goes wrong
The button says Book Now, so owners try to pick dates and cannot, and message instead.
The meet-and-greet is described but not bookable, so it becomes a phone call you have to return between visits.
The profile is demanded at first contact, so the form is abandoned on a phone.
The website prices say one thing and the software invoices another, which is a slow way to lose a good client.
Where this sits
A meet-and-greet booked online, scheduling handed to your pet care software, and a sample visit report shown on the page are how we build a pet sitting website, and the same pattern runs through our other pet business websites. Packages are on pricing. The software holds the animal. The site's job is to get a nervous owner to the meeting.