Sooner or later it happens to every apartment: the red wine on the pale sofa, the snapped shower shelf, the missing remote, the burn ring on the hob. Damage is not an exception; it is a predictable operating variable. Treat it that way and you lose neither money nor reviews. Treat it emotionally and you usually lose both.
Wear and tear is not damage
The most important distinction is one you make before the first incident, not after it. Ordinary wear is part of the business and belongs in your costing: scratches on worktops, dulled fittings, marks on textiles after two years, worn door seals. You cannot charge those to an individual guest — they are the price of the apartment being used.
Damage is different: an event that goes beyond normal use. The broken glass table, the forced drawer, the hole in the wall. And in between sits the category that causes most of the arguments: cleaning effort beyond the normal scope. A barbecue nobody touched is wear. A barbecue after a party of twelve is additional work you can quantify — if you defined it in advance.
Prevention costs less than recovery
The biggest lever sits before the booking. Clear house rules on occupancy, parties, smoking and pets, visible in the listing, filter more reliably than any deposit. An honestly communicated maximum occupancy prevents the booking for four that arrives as eight.
The second lever is the furnishing itself. Washable and replaceable textiles, darker covers at the critical spots, coasters within reach, wipeable surfaces, a spares stock for everything that breaks regularly. An apartment built for use produces far fewer disputes than one styled for photos.
The third lever is documenting the baseline condition. A photo set after every deep clean, dated, takes five minutes and is your only solid evidence when it matters.
Deposit, damage protection, or nothing
Classic deposits fit the platform world only partly: they raise the barrier at booking, they are laborious to collect and release, and their enforceability is limited. Some platforms run their own protection programmes instead, others allow a card pre-authorisation, and on direct bookings you can set your own terms.
What works in practice is a tiered logic. For short standard stays, no deposit — but clean house rules and documented condition. For higher-risk constellations — very large groups, local bookings with no travel reason, enquiries around known party dates — either a deposit or a pre-authorisation, or a deliberate decline. Declining is often the cheaper decision.
Check your insurance cover as well. A standard household policy frequently does not cover commercial short-term letting. That question deserves to be settled once, properly, with your insurer — in writing and for the actual use.
The process when damage occurs
When damage is reported, the first hour decides the outcome. Document immediately: photos from several angles, the date, a short description, and the cleaner's report in their own words. In parallel, fix anything that would affect the next guest — replacement matters more than attributing blame.
Only then comes the conversation with the guest. Report the damage within the relevant platform's deadline, factually, with photos and with a specific amount based on a receipt or a quote. Skip the accusations and skip round-number estimates. A documented 80 euros is accepted far more often than a felt claim of 300.
When to let it go
Do the honest maths: how much time does pursuing it cost, how likely is recovery, and what do you risk in review terms? For small amounts, quietly replacing the item is almost always the better decision — not out of softness, but because a bad review costs more than a side table.
Above an amount that exceeds the return of several nights, the opposite applies: pursue it properly, because otherwise you set a precedent that repeats.
Either way, keep a simple damage log per property. After a year you can see which items fail repeatedly, which guest segments stand out, and where investing in more robust material is cheaper than the next discussion. That is the real return on a disciplined damage routine.