Insurance is the topic owners most like to postpone, because it brings no bookings and improves no reviews. The price of that postponement only shows up when something goes wrong, and then it shows up in full. The most common sentence we hear in those moments is: “I thought the platform covered that.” This article sorts out the four areas in which short-term rentals are regularly uninsured. It is orientation for the conversation with your broker and explicitly not insurance or legal advice.

Why a private policy often does not apply

Contents and liability policies are written for private residential use. Paid, recurring accommodation of strangers is something else, and many policies exclude exactly that use or treat it as an increased risk that must be declared. The awkward quality of such clauses is their timing: they do not surface when you sign, but during claims assessment, when the insurer asks who was in the apartment at the time of the loss and on what basis.

What matters, therefore, is not whether you are insured but whether your insurer knows what you are doing. Declaring the use in writing is the smallest effective step and costs nothing but an email.

The four areas of cover

  • Liability. The area with the largest loss potential and the least attention. A guest falls on the stairs, burns themselves on the boiler, or a child falls from the balcony. This is not about inventory but about personal injury, and personal injury claims get very large.
  • Buildings. Escape of water, fire, storm. A burst pipe in an apartment occupied by changing users who cannot find the stopcock runs longer than in a lived-in home.
  • Contents and furnishings. Furniture, appliances, kitchen equipment. This is where the frequent small losses sit, and where platform schemes are relevant but limited.
  • Loss of income. The component most often missing. If the apartment is uninhabitable for six weeks after water damage, you lose not only the repair cost but six weeks of revenue, plus cancellation costs and rebookings.

What platform guarantees do, and do not, deliver

The damage programmes of the large platforms are useful, but they are a goodwill and settlement mechanism, not insurance with an enforceable claim on your side. Three limits are worth knowing:

  • They generally apply only to stays booked through that platform. Direct bookings, corporate clients and bookings via other channels fall outside, and that is precisely the part of the business most hosts want to grow.
  • They mainly respond to guest fault. Escape of water, a fire caused by a technical defect or storm damage is not guest damage and therefore not a platform case.
  • They require deadlines and evidence. Without handover documentation, dated photographs and a prompt report, the claim is practically unenforceable.
Platform guarantees supplement insurance cover, never replace it, and they stop where your direct bookings begin.

Use status is the sticking point

Several questions determine which contract is right in the first place, and they belong before the quote rather than after it. Are you letting a single apartment or several units? Do you let year-round or only a few weeks annually? Is the apartment part of a condominium association, and what does the association's buildings policy say about commercial use of individual units? That last point is almost always overlooked, even though in a serious case it affects the whole association and so creates additional conflict potential inside the building.

Once staff are involved, whether cleaners or a caretaker service, further obligations follow. If you work with self-employed contractors, clarify whether they can evidence their own business liability cover, because otherwise their mistake lands with you.

What to assemble before the broker conversation

A solid quote needs solid inputs. Have the following in writing beforehand, because each item shapes the policy:

  • Number of units, square metres, sleeping places and weeks of use per year
  • Annual revenue or a realistic forecast, as the basis for loss-of-income cover
  • Replacement value of the inventory, roughly calculated once rather than guessed
  • Existing risk mitigation: smoke alarms, extinguisher, water leak detectors, certified electrics, key management
  • Distribution channels, including direct bookings

That last line is the most important, because it describes your risk structure. The larger the share of direct bookings, the smaller the reach of any platform scheme and the clearer your own policy has to be.

In RM Advisory consulting work this point sits deliberately at the start of a setup rather than the end, because it is the one position that decides, when a loss occurs, between carrying on and shutting down. Everything else can be caught up later. Missing insurance cover cannot.