A member’s Home calendar IS NOT a schedule of when a member is willing to travel. It is a schedule of when a member’s HOME is available. I have noticed that sometimes people assume that these two things are identical. Sometimes these two schedules are identical, especially for members who have only one home or are working-age people with children who are restrained by jobs and school schedules.
But sometimes the schedule of a member’s personal travel dates is different than their home’s available dates. For example, a person may have two or more homes, so their own travel availability may be more than the availability of either of their homes. Or, they may be offering their home to people outside of Home Exchange (i.e. to friends or relatives or on another platform such as Airbnb), so their own travel availability is greater than the availability of their home to Home Exchange members.
This is actually another improvement that Home Exchange should implement on the platform… each member should have an availability schedule attached to their profile, which indicates when they personally are available to consider travel.
In this way, hosts who use reverse-search to find people who may be interested in coming to their home for Guest Point visits, may more easily identify those who may visit the host’s home on the available dates of the home.
Linked to the other topic, a lot of members don’t want to be contacted by this way and would not agree with such a calendar. Maybe some members Here could give their point of view to see if am I right ?
And, a lot of members, probably at least 50%, DO want to be contacted in this way.
Also, a profile calendar will assist members who are seeking a reciprocal exchange to evaluate whether a host might be available for a reciprocal exchange. A profile calendar will be useful for people seeking reciprocal exchanges because when people have two homes, the availability calendar of each home may be different. If there is no profile calendar, how do you propose that another member will know when the host member is available to travel? A profile calendar will help PREVENT members from receiving annoying messages because people seeking reciprocal exchanges will not send messages to people who are unable to travel on certain dates.
You seem obsessed with protecting members from “annoying” messages, even taking it upon yourself to decide for them whether or not they should receive messages.
If a Profile calendar were available, many members would use it.
If a member is offended by other members knowing their travel availability, then they are not required to update their availability calendar. It’s simple.
I’m not obssesed by anything personnaly I just think that this would be way too complicated for a lot of members ( who already struggle to use correctly the sites regular features, we have basic questions about that on the livetchat every day), especially new ones.
That is not a good reason to avoid adding a very useful function to platform, which will not cause annoyance to people (because they can choose not to use it, and will actually reduce “annoying” messages), but will provide an improved search function for people who choose to use it. Calendars are already in-use for member’s homes, so most of the learning-curve has already been completed for this additional function.
I just think that this would be way too complicated for a lot of members ( who already struggle to use correctly the sites regular features, we have basic questions about that on the livetchat every day), especially new ones.