Today we’re tackling something that most Airbnb hosts have an opinion on, and that is their Air Cover program. The marketing sounds great, right? Three million dollars in coverage. But the reality is a lot of hosts don’t know the right way to actually file claims. A lot of hosts lose claims even on the ones that they should definitely be winning.

There’s a big gap between what’s advertised and what actually gets paid out. So in this episode, we’re gonna break down everything you need to know. Welcome back to the “Short Term Rental Riches” podcast.

So what exactly is Airbnb’s- Air Cover program and not to be confused with their resolutions. I’ll get to that in just a second. Their Air Cover program is three million dollars in property protection and one million dollars in liability protection. Now, this is potential limits, right?

It’s included with every Airbnb booking, no additional signups, no additional costs. It is definitely not, though, a replacement for your property insurance.

So the standard flow is really to request a resolution first, but if the guest denies this or they just don’t respond, then it’s gonna get escalated to an Air Cover claim, And then you’ll have fourteen days to close that Air Cover process.

So what’s actually covered with Air Cover? Well, property damage. That’s good news, right? Theft, if anything goes missing in your property and you have proof of it. Extra cleaning costs, so sometimes a guest might leave the place a little bit too dirty. Any sort of structural damage, any sort of just real damage to your property.

Most hosts don’t know, though, that it can actually cover lost income. So if you have to cancel specific reservations due to that guest’s damage, then that can potentially be reimbursed

Now, what does it not cover? Well, most of these things are pretty obvious. It doesn’t cover the normal wear and tear of your property.

It wouldn’t cover potential loss of revenue, and so if you have damage and you end up blocking your calendar because you’re repairing it, but you never had a reservation during that calendar block, then they’re not going to pay you out for what could have been a potential reservation.

Now, they’re also not gonna cover items that you can’t accurately document. If you can’t prove that the item was there at your property beforehand, then they’re not going to cover it.

Quick suggestion there, if you haven’t already, take a video of your property, a walkthrough, and talk into an audio clip as you’re doing it. So you can use an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude to organize all the items that you have in your property. Of course

these details with photos can help, but it’s not gonna guarantee that you’re going to win the claim. Ultimately, if push comes to shove, you’re going to need a receipt and proper documentation for these items. So if you just furnished a property and you have all those receipts, make sure they’re organized in a nice clean place.

And again, you can use your AI tools to sift through all those receipts for you if you need them for an AirCover claim.

Now we’re gonna break down exactly the way our team handles Air Cover claims with all the little details that you’ll need to know. There’s actually quite a few steps there too, so we’ve also put together a quick guide for you. You can grab it in the link down below.

Before we do, I wanna break down just a personal story from a large Air Cover claim that I had not too long ago, almost seven thousand dollars worth. And so again, you gotta make sure you get this process nailed down because you could potentially have some big damage. Now, if you’ve been listening to this show for a long time, you know my team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests now in over fifty cities and multiple countries.

It’s been an amazing journey. We’ve certainly learned a lot, and so I hope this podcast has provided some value through our hard lessons. Some of those hard lessons in the early days were damage claims. We now have a lot of processes in place to prevent those, but sometimes accidents just happen. And so I recently had someone drive their car into a brand-new air conditioning unit.

It was actually a packaged unit, so it was the heater and the AC, almost seven thousand dollars. And unfortunately, it was basically brand new. It had been installed just a few weeks prior.

Now, we had messages from the guest telling us that they accidentally did it. We had it on our camera footage. We had documentation for the actual unit and cost. And so this one we won without too much struggle.

Airbnb paid us out six thousand seven hundred and twenty-three dollars within just seven days, and now we’re actually able to recoup some loss of income, not through Airbnb’s Air Cover program, but through the guest’s insurance policy.

They happened to be using Progressive Insurance, and we did have to block the calendar for a couple weeks to get the new equipment in to make the changes, and we did recoup some potential loss of income. If you don’t already have this in your existing insurance policy, well, I’d recommend talking with your agent.

If you’re relying heavily on your income from your short-term rental and you have some sort of big maintenance issue or maybe there’s a natural disaster and you get stuck without income potentially for months at a time, that could be really challenging, right? And so insurance… And so there is an option to include on your insurance policy loss of business income.

You get to choose the amount you wanna put on there, and you get to choose how far in the future you can go. Of course, within the insurance company’s limits, but oftentimes this might be six months or so.

So fortunately, that HVAC claim was pretty easy for us to win. The guest was totally honest, and we had all the documentation. But not all claims are that easy, and so let’s run through the exact process that our team has been using to win hundreds, if not thousands, of air cover claims.

Here’s our policy, and I’m just gonna read through the steps here because we’ve got quite a lot of them. So a lot of times these air cover claims happen after a guest has left, right? And so our first step when a guest leaves is to immediately inspect that property. Uh, everything needs to be checked after checkout.

Are there any missing items? Are there any damage? Anything like that. We have these all built into our custom housekeeping checklist. It makes it really easy for our housekeeper to take notes, to take pictures, to provide any evidence that we might need

If we do uncover some sort of damage or something was missing or broken, well then we’re gonna proceed directly with filing a claim. We used to not do this in fear of getting a bad review, but I’ve got a note on that in just a second. So we’re actually not gonna contact the guest if they’ve already checked out.

We’re just gonna go right to the AirCover claim process and involve Airbnb.

Any future guest communication is going to occur within that AirCover process with Airbnb’s help.

Now, if there is some sort of damage or smoking or something that happened while your guest was actually staying in the property, well then that’s a little different. You need to reach out immediately and communicate with the guest. Of course, you want the communication to be professional and clear and documented.

The idea is that you’re able to capture that conversation and use it as evidence if you discover that there is in fact damage.

So let’s imagine that there was actually some damage at your property or something was missing. We have four documentation standards that we use every time we submit a claim. We wanna make sure that we have some sort of timestamped visual. So either that’s a photo our housekeeper took, maybe that’s timestamped footage from a video.

We wanna use our cleaner or inspection checklist that’s already been completed.

We need some sort of cost validation, so we’re going to include either ideally the original invoice or a comparable item on Amazon, something like that. Uh, and then we also many times take it a step further and create an invoice directly underneath our company name. So you can do this as well using ChatGPT or one of the AI tools.

Just create an invoice. This could include things like the time it takes to swap that out, to find the new item, shipping, whatever it happens to be.

We wanna double-check that there was no platform communication, so no messages that are relevant were coming through Airbnb.

And then with all that, you’re going to get a claim reference or transaction ID for your AirCover claim.

Now, of course, if you’re missing any of that information, your chances of winning the claim are going to go down. We used to file our AirCover claims basically at the end of the allowable window in fear that we might get a bad review. But we flip that around now, and we submit everything as soon as we find it.

We do do this before posting our review, but if the guest ends up leaving a bad review and there was some sort of retaliation or something in there that had to do with your AirCover claim, well, then that is grounds to have that review removed.

You will have to escalate that with Airbnb. Getting reviews removed is not as easy as it once was, but it is still certainly possible.

And then you’re always gonna wanna leave a public response to those reviews too. And of course, you wanna make sure that it’s a professional response,

You want to make sure it’s free of accusations or any sort of assumptions.

So that’s really the process, and it’s great that Airbnb has this. Booking.com has just released their equivalent damage program, and our team is filing claims over there as well, and we are winning them as well. And so we’ll have to do a separate episode on that process as we really perfect it. But in a nutshell, AirCover, great to have.

The more documentation you have, the better, but this is not a replacement for your insurance policy.

We’ve talked about insurance a lot on this channel before. You can check out policies with proper insurance. They’re one of the leading insurance companies for short-term rentals. There’s also a lot of other ones out there these days, like Safely or Generali. And there’s also other ways to protect your property, like using damage waivers or collecting deposits.

Remember, we’ve got our full guide with all the details in the link down below if you want to just copy our process or give our process over to one of your team members helping with your properties. Remember, AirCover is not a replacement for insurance, although it can help as long as you’re filing those claims correctly.

I hope this gave you a little bit more insight, and until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.