Airbnb Hosting Tips | How To Use Aircover | Tim Hubbard

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. If you're new to the channel, if you're new to the podcast, thank you for joining us. And just as a quick background, I've been investing in short term rentals for a long time, about seven years. Have acquired dozens in multiple cities and now in multiple countries. And my team and I have managed a lot of guests, over 20,000 actually. So we've learned a thing or two. We've also learned that sometimes some things can happen to our properties that we don't want. Right. We talk a lot about how to protect ourselves from those types of things. And the reality is, is that they don't happen very often at all. It's a very small percentage. But when they do happen, we need to be protected and we need to know what options we have to be reimbursed. And Airbnb released what they call air cover. So that's what I want to talk about this week. Welcome to Short Term Rental Rich. Discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals, quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard. Thanks again for joining me. Airbnb used to have their host protection, they called it, which was better than nothing, right? And definitely you could get things filed and get money back from that, but it was sort of a difficult process. And now they've released what they call air cover, which is a good move to get more hosts in the game, provides more protection. I would say this is probably what most people are most afraid of, that their property is going to get damaged or something like that. So I want to break down just the basics for you today so you know what options you have available. So it is really good. It does provide a lot more than the host guarantee did. And one of the things it provides that the host guarantee didn't is liability protection. So it will actually potentially. Of course, all of these claims depend on the amount of evidence and proof and documents and photos and those types of things that you have to support your claim with Airbnb. But it does have a built in host liability insurance, which can cover you from bodily injury to a guest if something happens, if they tripped and and fell, damage to property that belonged to others, guests in the property. So if somehow you were responsible, your property was responsible for damaging something the guest had, well then you could potentially be covered for that as well. And also if something gets stolen from the guest, you could potentially be covered with that as well. So again, anytime we're submitting a resolution with Airbnb, trying to get reimbursement for anything. The more proof we have, the more documentation we the better, the easier, the faster it's going to be. So that is a really good move for Airbnb. So that's great for us. Doesn't cost us anything. Right now, of course, we want to make sure we have liability insurance on our properties anyways. If you have a specific short term rental insurance policy, which I highly recommend, it will cover things like liability. So double check. I use a company called Proper Insurance, but there are quite a few out there now. And if you have a commercial property that has its own liability policy, well, then that's gonna help you with some of those things as well. So double check your insurance. But just know that you do have this option now with air cover from Airbnb. So what are some of the things that it protects you from in terms of damage? They've added a couple or really focused on a couple pieces here. One is smoking. We know our guests, some of our guests will end up smoking in our properties. And so there's extra protection against smoke and deep clean. So if your housekeeper has to spend twice as long cleaning your property, it's going to be a little easier to get compensated for that now. But you do have to document it. So those are a couple of things. We'll go into the best way to document this and try to get it back from Airbnb or from your guest. But let's just recap these benefits real quick. So extra deep cleaning, you can get compensated for smoke damage, you can get compensated for income loss protection. So this is a good one. Let's say a guest checks out of your property and they did smoke a lot, and your next guest can't check in because it just smells too bad in there. Again, I don't want to scare everyone that these things are happening all the time, because they're not. And if we take the right measures, we can almost eliminate most of them or all of them. But if someone does and it affects the guests from moving in, well, you could get compensated from future reservations. So let's say you had a reservation for $500. It was a back to back check in. So a guest left, they smoked in the place and your new guest wouldn't come in. Well, they didn't want to stay there, it wasn't ready for them. Well, you could get compensated for that lost income. So that is a really good feature. And that's also something that is on a lot of general liability Commercial property policies, too, from your normal insurer. Again, you want to check with them, but I know that's something on my apartment buildings, for example, like if we have a fire and it takes six months to rebuild the property, a lot of times you can pay additionally to have that protection against lost income. So now Airbnb has that for us for our short term rentals. That's good. We also have a longer filing window. So with the host guarantee, we had to submit stuff right away. We actually have two weeks now. So if you have an issue, you can file it as a draft. So you don't have to submit everything, but you want to upload all of your documents to Airbnb as soon as possible, make sure they're within that 14 day window and you get it all sent off within 14 days. Now, one of the nice things about this, because we don't have to file these resolutions as quickly as we did in the past, again, this is all gonna happen through Airbnb. This is specific to Airbnb, but we have more time now, which means if there was an issue, let's say guests damaged the door or something like that, or some sort of issue where if you were going to bring it up to the guests, it could potentially lead them to give you a bad review. And you're concerned about that. Well, now you can get the review from the guest, you have a longer window, 14 days, and then submit the request afterwards after you've already gotten a review. So that can help us out a little bit. Right. So that's pretty nice. And of course, we don't want to be sending anything that isn't honest or anything like that. It's all going to be backed up by documents and images and messages. But if there was something that we think might lead that guest to give us a bad review and we know it's right for them to compensate us, well, then we can wait a little longer now, get the review from the guest and then ask for fair reimbursement afterwards. So that is nice. They're also reimbursing quicker. So it used to take a long time and it still can take a long time. But now they are processing all the air cover compensation within two weeks, or they're trying to shoot for two weeks. And if you are a super host, one other perk to being a super host, you have a little more of a fast track with air cover. So a lot of benefits there. Again, we don't have to pay anything additional for these. These are included in Airbnb. They want more people to rent their properties. And so this is a great perk because a lot of other travel sites do not have this protection for us. So really good news here. So we talked a little bit about the features, we talked about of the highlights and new ones like loss of income and liability and deep cleaning compensation or smoking compensation. So those are really nice. Now, how do we go about getting this money back? So we're going to use the Resolution center like we have done in the past for host guarantee and any sort of compensation we're asking back from the guests. We've used the Resolution center, so we're going to continue to use that. Remember, we've got a little longer filing period, but basically we're going to collect evidence as much as we have. So photos of someone smoked in there. If you had extra cleaning, you have an invoice from your housekeeper that was twice as much as your normal invoice. Well, then you can use that. If you have a property management company helping you with your property or you have your own property management company like I do. Fortunately, we can make our own invoices and send those and those count. So that is another way to go about it. But basically you just want to have as much proof as possible. Invoices are a really big help. So we're going to submit everything we have. Hopefully the guest agrees and they know and it was fair and everyone's, it's a win win scenario. But if it's not, what do you do? Well, then it's going to get escalated to an Airbnb ambassador. They're going to step in, they're going to help us out, and hopefully you guys can reach a good arrangement. So that is air cover in a nutshell. It's newer, it's basically rebranded. It's their insurance, essentially, for our properties, which I think is fantastic because again, it doesn't cost us anything else. Yes, we pay commission fees for them to rent our properties out and so do the guests, but this is extra protection. And the more we have, the better it's going to be. When guests and the whole community knows that we have these protections in place, people won't be trying to escape the system a little bit, if you know what I mean. So this is really good news. If you haven't heard of this before, take a look at it. Make sure you know what you can be compensated for. If you don't have some of those procedures in place for getting good evidence and documents and stuff like that right after guest checks out before your next guest checks in. Make sure you revisit that a little bit because that's one of the most crucial steps there. So I hope you're doing well. Hopefully you don't have to use this too often, but just know it's there. Thanks for tuning in again, and until next time, I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll talk to you soon. If you're looking for a ton of free resources, well, you can check out the links in the show notes or head to our website restmethods.com where you'll find free guides, house rules, and my ebook on finding the best short term rental properties. Thanks for tuning in.