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AirCover by Airbnb
- mindslight 5y ago> These Host Damage Protection Terms contain an arbitration clause and class action waiver So this insurance policy isn't even worth the pixels it's rendered on. It's not a good sign when a company purporting to be entering into contract is already trying to wriggle out of it, and this goes doubly for insurance.
- otterley 5y agoIt’s not just Airbnb - every insurance policy written today is loaded with exceptions you could fit a Mack truck through. The textbook business model of insurance is to collect premiums and try as hard as possible not to pay claims.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI remember watching an old episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, where an insurance executive was talking to one of his employees, and said: "The job of an insurance company is to take in as much money as possible, then refuse to pay it back."
- arp242 5y agoTo be fair, fraud is a serious issue. If there were no checks at all then every innkeeper would be burning their tavern down right after getting an inn-sewer-ants polly-sea.
- ekianjo 5y agoTo be fair, policy opacity with tiny letters clauses is a serious issue. If there were a few hundred execeptions less insurances would still turn a massive profit.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoHad to give a thumbs-up for the Sir Terry reference.
- WJW 5y agoPerhaps The Beverly Hillbillies is not the most reliable source for business model information.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoIt was basically a lighthearted posting. I apologize for being unclear, but I thought that mentioning the show would have indicated this.
- gennarro 5y agoPerhaps a dumb question but who was handling the insurance before this? Homeowners does not cover rentals, correct? So you needed rental insurance? I’ve always seen airbnb to be too risky to do with your primary residence, which seems to greatly diminish from the efficiency of the service (and of home ownership)
- carlivar 5y agoI host an Airbnb and I have a policy specifically covering short term rentals.
- ProAm 5y agoHow much is this policy (say in terms of your normal owners policy). Are you in the US? This would be good info to know about.
- carlivar 5y agoI'm in the U.S. I don't find the policy any more expensive than it would be for a long term rental property. This is a ski town condo and most of the risk to the insurer is fire I think, not Airbnb renters.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 5y agoNobody. AirBNB lived on the gray area where people rented properties that weren’t setup or insured for such.
- addicted 5y agoThat’s basically the gig economy. Shifting all the hidden and one off costs to unsophisticated gig workers who are unable to factor those costs in.
- crehn 5y agoSo what would happen in practice if I completely trashed an Airbnb for $1M's worth?
- maddynator 5y agoWouldn’t you have to have a guest rent it out via airbnb to be eligible?
- crehn 5y agoWhat if I'm the guest?
- gameman144 5y agoYou would be sued for a million dollars in damages by the owner, and it would be an open and shut case.
- googlge6X 5y agoI rent an Airbnb in Miami but fly back to uk after a hangover style party. Good luck sueing me, even if you did most people don't have a 10,000usd never mind a 1m, then enforcement and collection.how does that open and shut?
- resonantjacket5 5y agoYou'd have a hard time re-entering the usa after automatically losing the case by not showing up at the courthouse and not paying the bill. But in any case the scenario of leaving the country is not unique to airbnb and exists for rental cars, other loans, and basically any activity involving borrowing something
- rootsudo 5y agoNot really. no time to re-enter, they will not enforce this upon entry. It is not criminal, it is civil. It is not criminal yet to not show up in a civil case.
- TedShiller 5y agoWow, that's impressive
- rootsudo 5y agoWow, the astroturfing in this thread already is happening. 0. This is nothing new, airbnb always had a free "guarantee" they just rebranded it basically from what I see to a trademarkable name. 1. Umbrella policy is better than airbnb. Umbrella policy will go after all parties including airbnb on your behalf. 2. Airbnb has a history of ignoring or mitigating damages unless you get famous on social media - this includes sexual assault/rape and murder of animals. https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Help/Guest-caused-the-death-of-hosts-dog/td-p/1250138 https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Help/Guest-caused-the-de... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/16/airbnb-new-york-woman-allegedly-raped-settlement https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/16/airbnb-ne... While these are just two incidents, there are countless more that can be searched, or you can probably filter through other incidents, and yes, while airbnb did "compensate" they did so only after intense media pressure. 3. If you are a tourist in most countries and "fly" back home, you are judgement proof. There only liability is the guests airbnb account, which, is worthless. You can create new accounts, and in most places you can use alternative government identification to bypass previous bans. You can read the link I posted earlier about the death of a dog, the PII that airbnb released was not enough to start a civil court case. And even if you have a name, you have no guarantee that the nae of the airbnb account is the ACTUAL guest that stayed.
- numair 5y agoThere was a weird ad-post for You.com earlier, which I mistakenly thought was organic... And now this. HN needs a bit more transparency or it’s going to lose a few of us.
- FuckedCompany 5y agoHN has already lost a lot of quality posters over the last 10 years. It’s a drop in the bucket as more and more new registrations happen anyway. For the savvy reader: the best kind of astroturfing on a tech site involves nerdsniping. Make a small obvious error and you’ll get people trampling over each other to correct you. Never underestimate how smug stooges can pay off. Keep an eye out for these kinds of posts (see Twitter blue thread).
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- blondie9x 5y agoThis is nothing new from Airbnb. Just a new name and a newly updated webpage. Also checkboxes help. But yeah nothing new.
- sideshownz 5y ago"While AirCover protects you while you’re hosting an Airbnb stay or Experience, it is not a substitute for personal insurance" This is a key point. As a host here in NZ, its basically useless as I still have to have commercial insurance. Aircover only covers you for the period of time that you have someone staying in your property. As soon as they have gone, you have no insurance. So if you have a house listed on Airbnb and someone breaks in and burns it down between bookings, you're not covered.
- ThePhysicist 5y agoI mean the risk you mention seems unrelated to your business relationship with AirBnB. Personally I wouldn't expect their insurance to e.g. cover natural disasters either.
- andix 5y agoThose are two different things. Normal insurances for your house cover fire damage or burglary, but not the damage done by your guests. The Airbnb insurance does exactly that.
- system16 5y agoWhy should AirBnb be responsible for covering issues that arise between stays? I mean, it would be nice if I could just sign up as a host for my condo, set it as unavailable for most of the year and get free insurance.
- onionisafruit 5y agoThe point isn’t that airbnb should cover that situation, it’s that hosts need insurance anyway and that insurance should cover everything this covers plus more.
- jjeaff 5y agoI think some home insurance providers might balk if they find the damages were caused by commercial renters. If this covers all issues related to commercial activity, then you would be fine with just residential homeowner's insurance.
- ciguy 5y agoTheoretical insurance doesn't help you when Airbnb will simply ignore you or close your claim without explanation. They have become completely predatory and incompetent towards hosts in the past few years. As soon as something goes wrong they will find a reason to deny your claim. Their support that handles these cases is clearly incentivized to close cases without payouts. The only way anyone sees any coverage from them is if they get social media famous and then they quietly sweep it under the rug and make them sign a non-disclosure agreement to get their payout.
- wombatmobile 5y ago> They have become completely predatory and incompetent towards hosts in the past few years. I'm discovering that, having just become an Airbnb host in the last year for my beach pad. My new worst experience is Airbnb doing nothing and saying "too bad" when a guest with a new profile stayed for 3 days, then wrote a scathing review warning people off and demanding a refund. The guest posted in her review that the place is full of broken furniture, rock hard beds worse than in communist countries, black mould, animal smells, urine smells, and is a health hazard. She used a lot of capital letters and accused me of punishing her for "sins not yet committed." And yet she didn't contact me or Airbnb to complain until after the end of her stay of 3 nights. My property averaged 4.8 stars (out of max 5) prior to that with zero negative reviews. I thought Airbnb might consider she is trying to scam a refund. But they say she hasn't done anything against their policies so too bad. The review stays. When I tried to complain the support ambassador warned me that if I insist on an investigation it could result in penalties for me as a host. I asked Airbnb to send someone out to check my property so they can see the guest is being unreasonable, but of course, Airbnb doesn't have anyone who can come out because it isn't a real company. It's just a listed entity on the stock exchange that made a few people $100 billion renting properties owned by... people like me.
- bambax 5y agoSorry for your experience. I do use Airbnb occasionally as a guest but would never consider hosting. It's just too dangerous, insurance or not, and not worth it IMHO. > Airbnb doesn't have anyone who can come out because it isn't a real company This part is especially infuriating. Google, Amazon, Airbnb, etc. they're all the same. They play a numbers game. At one point they may run out of people to trample though.
- LurkingPenguin 5y agoThe definition of "air cover" is: > protection from aircraft for land-based or naval operations in war situations. AirBnB needs better branding people.
- tiku 5y agoDoes it cover the costs of you guests illegally downloading stuff? I've ran into that one myself (in Germany the host can have it dismissed when you can prove it wasn't you).
- petercooper 5y agoWouldn't that be more a legal thing? A bit like you can't take out insurance against speeding tickets. I guess they could offer some sort of insurance for covering your legal fees to deal with such things, though.
- xeromal 5y agoYeah, sounds like a law the state/country would need to make.
- dewey 5y agoIf I was renting out an AirBnb in Germany I'd probably just set up a travel router that pipes everything through a VPN in a neighbouring country.
- bingohbangoh 5y agoCan’t you block a router to block all torrents?
- schleck8 5y agoYou could try blocking ports used by P2P frequently.
- orangepanda 5y agoSomeone I know who owns a hotel in germany said it happens so rarely that it's cheaper to pay the fines than maintain router configurations or spend time to dismiss them.
- tomhunters 5y agoThe hosts should have a kind of protection in case downloading illegal stuff is happening in their stays.
- joshfraser 5y agoI put way too much faith in Airbnb's "million dollar coverage" when I was a host. I had an Airbnb guest steal all the electronics from my apartment -- Sonos speakers, wifi router, everything. They also left behind a large stack of obviously stolen credit cards, social security cards, and driver licenses. When I called up Airbnb support to tell them what happened they responded by saying "We've found that most disputes between hosts are just misunderstandings. Have you tried talking to them about it?" Then when I tried to claim they needed original receipts (which I obviously didn't have for everything) and ultimately only paid out a small fraction of the original cost (because the items were no longer new).
- AlwaysRock 5y agoSounds like every interaction I've had with insurance. Sorry to hear that.
- Tiktaalik 5y agoI was thinking that. Insurance in general is lousy with them always trying to weasel their way out of paying anything. Would a more typical insurer have done the same thing in asking for receipts and such? Maybe? (I've never had to make such an insurance claim so I have no idea...)
- dzivo22 5y agoTraditional insurance policies are written on a "replacement cost" basis. Which means.....the carrier will initially pay what they consider to be a depreciated value for the item, then when you purchase the identical or similar item, you show them the receipt, and the carrier then forwards a secondary check for the difference of the depreciated value (payment 1 to you) and the current retail price.
- busterarm 5y agoBut a real insurer also isn't facilitating bringing the people who made the damages into your house. Airbnb has the means to properly screen guests, but does not adequately do so. I've always personally thought both sides of the AirBNB transaction were crazy. When I was a teenager, long before AirBNB was a thing, we used to rent houses to party in and it was always a disaster. I've never found that getting a hotel was significantly more expensive. Getting my price might be less convenient distance wise but the experience is consistent. To me, AirBNB seems like all of the risks of unprotected sex without any of the upside.
- post_break 5y agoDoes this do anything to address the rapes and sexual assaults that occur inside of an Airbnb? I remember those being swept under the rug with NDAs to receive compensation.
- jaspax 5y agoAm I missing something? I fail to see how an assault within a rented AirBnB would be a claim against the owner, unless they had been negligent in some way allowing the attacker to gain entry.
- post_break 5y agoThe last big case involved an airbnb where the shared key to the apartment was basically known by the attacker.
- joshfraser 5y agoI can see that being an issue as most hosts don't change their lockbox codes between every guest.
- jjeaff 5y agoLots of Airbnb listings are for a room in an existing home where the owner is living.
- bradgranath 5y agoOr just being told to go away.
- switch007 5y ago"Most misunderstandings can be resolved between the host and guest"
- annexrichmond 5y agowhen I bought a vacation home for myself I was initially hesitant because the HOA doesn't permit short term rentals or Airbnb's. But I'm actually glad. The hassle of worrying about your personal belongings is just not worth it IMO. I want to buy nice nice furniture for my place and not worry about strangers ruining it. Although I do want friends & family to be able to enjoy it. Maybe a site like Path was to Facebook?
- bradgranath 5y agoGood luck on finding anyone there to make a claim to. They've had 'million dollar' coverage from the start. They just don't pay claims. Yo AirBnB: when's the last time you paid out a million dollars to anyone?
- ArtDev 5y agoAs a host, Airbnb is a nightmare to deal with. It feels like their customer service was offshored to the cheapest contractor many years ago.