The two halves
AirCover for Hosts is two products, not one
Almost every summary of AirCover for Hosts leads with a single large number, and that is where the misreading starts. Airbnb’s own page describes “$3M Host damage protection” and “$1M Host liability insurance” as separate components. They are not two tiers of the same cover, and they do not add up to a pot you can draw on for whatever goes wrong.
Damage protection is about your property being harmed. Liability insurance is about somebody else being harmed, and you being found legally responsible for it. Those are different events, different claim routes, and, as the exclusion lists make clear, deliberately non-overlapping categories.
Knowing which half a given incident falls into is most of the practical skill here, because filing into the wrong one is how a claim stalls.
Damage
The $3M half: your place and your things
Host damage protection applies where a guest damages your place or your belongings during a stay. Airbnb’s description also extends it past breakage into cleaning, naming specialised cleaning for stains left by guests or their invitees, pet accidents, and smoke odour removal, plus vehicle damage and lost income from bookings you had to cancel because of guest-caused damage.
That cleaning clause is the part hosts underuse, and it is easy to see why: a stain feels like an annoyance rather than an incident, so it gets treated rather than documented. It is the same money either way, and the second route is the one that pays.
Where the deposit used to sit, this now sits, and it behaves nothing like one. Our guide to the Airbnb security deposit covers that swap in full, including why most hosts can no longer charge a deposit at all.
Liability
The $1M half almost nobody reads
Host liability insurance is the quieter component and the one that would matter most on the worst day. Airbnb describes it as “$1 million in coverage in the rare event you are found legally responsible”, and names three things it applies to: bodily injury to a guest or others, damage to or theft of property belonging to a guest or others, and damage caused by a guest or others to common areas such as building lobbies and nearby properties.
That third line is worth pausing on if you host in a block of flats. A guest who floods a hallway or damages a neighbouring property is a scenario most hosts have never priced, and it is named specifically. Airbnb also states the underwriters by region, listing Zurich Insurance Company Ltd. in the UK and Zurich Insurance Europe AG, branch in Spain, for the EEA.
The exclusions are short and pointed: damage or injury resulting from something done intentionally is not covered, damage to your own place or belongings caused by a guest is not covered here, and the page adds that other exclusions apply.
The split
Reading the two exclusion lists against each other
Set the two side by side and the design becomes obvious. Each product excludes precisely what the other one is for, which means the boundary is clean and the two figures are not one ceiling you can spend either way.
What sits between the columns is the part worth naming. Ordinary wear, anything done deliberately, and the building itself are in neither list. A host reading a single headline figure tends to assume all three are somewhere inside it, and none of them is.
Each half excludes precisely what the other one is for, which is why they do not add up to a single ceiling.
Your policy
Does it replace your own insurance? Airbnb does not say
This is the question hosts actually arrive with, and it deserves a straight answer about the state of the evidence. Airbnb’s liability page sets out what the cover applies to and what it excludes. It does not state whether it replaces a host’s own home, landlord or short-let policy. That is not us failing to find the sentence; the sentence is not on the page.
Plenty of articles will answer it for you anyway, and their confidence is not sourced to anything Airbnb published. The defensible position is the one the exclusions imply: cover written to handle guest-caused damage and third-party injury is not written to handle a burst pipe in February, a fire, a theft with nobody staying, or the structure of the building. Those are ordinary property risks and they belong to an ordinary property policy.
So the useful move is not to decide the question from a blog post. It is to take the two exclusion lists above to whoever writes your buildings and contents cover and ask them what their policy says about short-term letting, which is the clause that most often turns out to be the real problem.
The claim
Filing without losing the claim
The damage side runs on a short clock. Airbnb says to file a reimbursement request in the Resolution Center within 14 days of the responsible guest’s checkout, with photos or videos, repair or cleaning estimates, or receipts. The guest gets 24 hours to respond, and if they decline, pay part, or say nothing, the request moves to Host damage protection and Airbnb Support reviews it.
Three habits protect it. Photograph at turnover before anything is cleaned, because a treated stain is an untreatable claim. Get a real estimate or receipt rather than your own figure. And give your cleaner a standing instruction to message you the moment something is found, since the most common way to lose the window is a competent cleaner quietly fixing the evidence. Our Airbnb cleaning checklist guide covers where that instruction sits in the turnover order.
One more boundary from Airbnb’s own page: it states the cover does not apply to hosts offering stays through Airbnb Travel, LLC, or to stays and Experiences in Japan. Worth checking rather than assuming, if either describes you.
Everything you hand a guest, matched and priced to move together.
Read AirCover as two narrow products rather than one broad one, know which half an incident belongs to before you file, and keep your own policy answering the risks that neither half mentions. Tell us in the comments whether you have ever filed on the liability side, because almost every host story you read online is about the damage half and the quieter one is the reason the cover exists.
FAQ
Common questions, answered briefly
Is AirCover for Hosts $4 million of cover?
Does AirCover replace my own home or landlord insurance?
What does Host liability insurance actually cover?
How long do I have to file a damage claim?
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