I add £2.40 to every Airbnb night to cover what guests break or take

In January I sat down with a year of receipts, a battered notebook, and a bottle of Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Malbec. The plan was to work out, finally, how much guest damage was actually costing me across five properties. Two in Brighton, one in Edinburgh Old Town, one up near Grasmere, and a studio in Hove I keep threatening to sell. What I found was not news exactly. But it was finally a number, and now I know what to price into every nightly rate.

Here's the damage, in order, from embarrassing to eye-watering.

Missing: fourteen wine glasses. Eleven towels. Six teaspoons. One cafetiere plunger (not the cafetiere, just the plunger, which is somehow worse). Two duvet covers, one fitted sheet. A ceramic salt pig I loved. The remote for the Brighton front-bedroom smart TV. A set of four napkin rings I'd had for years. The little toasting fork from the Lake District fireplace, which probably got used once and then vanished forever.

Broken: three wine glasses (separate incidents, so call it seventeen gone total). A John Lewis bedside lamp. The bedroom door handle at the Edinburgh flat, ripped clean off at 2am on a Saturday. A Le Creuset milk pan, somehow. The glass panel of the oven door in Brighton Two. A Dyson V8 screen that got cracked when a child apparently used it as a skateboard — £78 to replace, not the whole unit.

Deep clean required beyond a normal turnover: four times. Twice for vomit, once for what my cleaner Magda still calls The Incident, once for dog hair after a guest brought a Labrador on a no-pets booking and left hair on every soft surface in the flat.

Add up parts, labour, and the hours Magda and I spent sorting it, I was down £1,847 over the year across five properties. Averaged out, £369 per flat per year. Or roughly £7 per booking, once you spread it across my 264 total turnovers.

Now here is the bit that took me three goes to get right.

AirCover doesn't make you whole

Airbnb's AirCover for Hosts is advertised as $3m USD of damage protection per booking, which sounds extravagant until you actually try to claim. Airbnb's help pages spell out what it covers: art, vehicles, pet damage, deep cleaning, even income loss if you have to cancel a booking because of guest damage. Good list. The wording matters though. The claim process is formal. You need receipts, timestamped photos, before-and-after, ideally the booking still visible in the host dashboard within fourteen days.

Over the year I put in six claims. I won four. The two I lost were the broken wine glasses (below the excess of proving, honestly) and the salt pig (described as "wear and tear" by the caseworker, which was generous to the guest). The four I won paid out £611 combined. Not nothing. But they didn't touch missing teaspoons, or the cafetiere plunger, or the dozens of small things that add up to a takeaway a week.

And that's before we talk about Vrbo or Booking.com, where you're more or less on your own unless you've got a separate standalone short-term rental policy. I use a UK broker called Pikl for two of the flats. The other three I self-insure, which is another way of saying I absorb it.

The 'spread it across the nights' maths

The spreadsheet I rebuilt in January has one new column called 'breakage buffer'. It's calculated per property, based on the prior year's actual loss. Here's what that looked like:

• Brighton One (64 nights booked at avg £178): £412 loss, £6.44 per night, so I added £2.50
• Brighton Two (81 nights at avg £162): £498 loss, £6.14 per night, added £2.50
• Edinburgh (73 nights at avg £205): £376 loss, £5.15 per night, added £2.00
• Lake District (51 nights at avg £240): £268 loss, £5.25 per night, added £2.00
• Hove studio (127 nights at avg £98): £293 loss, £2.31 per night, added £3.00 (because it's a smaller base and breakage here is proportionally bigger)

Average across the portfolio: £2.40 per night added. Not a huge figure. Most guests won't notice it, and I'm no longer swallowing every broken glass out of take-home pay.

Does it work? Across three months of 2026 so far, yes, roughly. I've had £142 of actual breakage and replacement, and I've banked £287 of breakage buffer. The buffer is getting eaten slowly and predictably, which is the point.

What to actually track

If you're running more than two properties, a notebook isn't going to cut it. I use Hoststock for the inventory side — every missing item logs against a turnover, the cleaner can note breakages in the app, and at the end of the month I've got a tidy list of what's gone and what needs reordering. Before that I had a Google Sheet that went out of date by the fourth entry. The data point I care about most is per-guest loss, and I only ever knew that once I started logging it properly.

The columns I keep:

• Item and quantity
• Replacement cost (I round up — £12 for a wine glass, not £8.50, because by the time I've paid for shipping, bubble wrap, and my time, it's £12)
• Which turnover it happened on
• Whether I think it was accidental, deliberate, or just wear
• Whether I claimed on AirCover, and what happened

That last column is the one most hosts skip. Keeping the claim outcome stops you wasting forty minutes filing for a category where you've already lost twice — and it gives you a quick readout of which properties are claim-worthy and which ones aren't.

What AirCover and Pikl won't cover — and why I stopped worrying

Small stuff. They don't cover small stuff, and honestly, you don't want them to. If AirCover had a line for teaspoons, every host on the platform would be filing claims about teaspoons, and the whole scheme would fall over. What actually matters, as a host running multiple units, is:

• Structural damage (doors, windows, appliances over £150)
• Theft of high-value items (TVs, art, the Dyson)
• Guest-caused issues that cost you nights (the cancelled booking in the week after vomit-gate was worth £244 in missed revenue, which AirCover reimbursed)
• Liability if a guest hurts themselves

Those are the categories AirCover and Pikl both handle well. The twelve wine glasses are your problem. Price them in.

The damage-deposit theatre

I stopped using the Airbnb damage-deposit feature about eighteen months ago. You can set one up to £2,000 per booking. The problem: Airbnb doesn't actually collect it upfront. It's an authorisation hold, which Airbnb itself only initiates if you file a damage claim — at which point you're inside the AirCover process anyway. It's theatre. A damage deposit that doesn't sit in your account is a damage deposit that doesn't deter anything.

If you want a deposit with teeth, you'd need to send guests off-platform to a Stripe or GoCardless pre-auth, which is both a policy violation and an enormous hassle. I've stopped bothering. The breakage buffer baked into the nightly rate is doing the same job more quietly, and I'm not asking anyone for a card number at 11pm the night before check-in.

Seasonal patterns worth knowing

One thing I didn't expect: breakage is not evenly spread. Three data points from my year:

The Lake District cottage breaks stuff mostly in November and December. Group bookings, log fires, a lot of wine. Magda once counted eleven empty bottles in the recycling after a three-night stay. The ceramic salt pig died in December.

The Brighton flats break stuff mostly in late May and early June — stag do season, hen do season, and the end of the academic year. It's the one time of year I take the decent glassware out and put cheap Ikea stuff in.

The Hove studio barely breaks anything, but guests take things. Small things. It has the highest ratio of missing to broken of any property, and I'm fairly sure it's because short solo business stays leave less evidence and more 'accidental' packing.

Two things I'd do differently if I were starting again

First: buy glassware in sets of eight, not six, from day one. You will lose two per year per flat. Starting with eight means you still have a matching six in twelve months' time, which is the number you need for a dinner-party listing photo. I learned this the third time I tried to replace a specific Sainsbury's Home line that had been discontinued.

Second: log breakages the day they happen, not at the end of the month. I tried both. End-of-month logging has a recall error of something like forty percent. Not because my cleaner is lying. Because five turnovers later, a tiny chip in a plate is invisible until you pick it up.

If you pay your cleaner a small bonus per logged breakage — I pay Magda £1 per item she notes with a photo — the logging gets remarkably consistent. That's another £60 or so a year in total across five flats. Cheap data.

The summary, in one line

Year of damage and breakage across five flats: £1,847. AirCover payouts: £611. Gap I'd been quietly absorbing: £1,236. Now priced into nightly rates at an average of £2.40. Boring, unsexy, and finally no longer a surprise at the end of the year.