Does homeowner's/renter's insurance cover the property damage from renting out your place?
Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
241–250 of 399 posts
Re: Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Car insurance is different, because it also covers damages you inflict on others and other people's property. I am speaking out against mandatory insurance of your own property. Yes, there will be cases where people are underinsured. But mandatory insurance would make some people overinsured. There is a long argument to be made for balancing this tradeoff, but in short: Owners are in a better position to judge whethe…
It's very easy for younger smart people to be anarcho-capitalists (which I take it you are), but IMHO becomes progressively harder as you age. The basic problem is that a "people know what's best for themselves" policy screws over dumb people for the simple reason that they don't. Car insurance is a very interesting thing to legislate, because although the expected value of buying insurance is slightly negative, when…
No.
I wasn't even making an argument for mandatory car insurance. I was merely pointing out the difference to mandatory property insurance and said that this difference _might_ be the basis for a convincing argument in favor of the former.
Re: Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
#243I'm shocked by some things I've read in this article. I don't want to blame the victim, but the author has rented out their home for a full week and left identity and financial documents behind a plywood or MDF door. Data, passport, birth certificate, and cash. Trusting people is nice, but surely there's a limit at which it becomes insane. I get a little nervous when I leave my documents in my (empty) apartment over a long weekend; I'm flabbergasted as to why the author seemingly wasn't bothered until after the crime.
Re: Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
#244The guests sound like drug addicts. (Maybe meth? Tweakers do bizarre things like move furniture at odd hours or burn fires without opening the flue.) I've been a happy AirBnb guest on a few occasions; the one time I had someone's whole usual studio apartment I found it a bit strange how much of their life was left on display for me – like the host's prescriptions still in the fridge! – but of course respected their p…
Speculation alert
----------------------
Could be drug addicts. But my hunch says it could be some known persons to the unfortunate host, playing some dreadful prank. Reasons:
1) From the blog: 'All the while, Dj Pattrson was sending me friendly emails, thanking me for being such a great host, for respecting his/her privacy…. telling me how much he/she was enjoying my beautiful apartment bathed in sunlight, how much he/she particularly loved the “little loft area” upstairs… with an “lol” closing one sentence' This suggests motivation to cause a greater hurt. Thieves will just steal. Drug addicts may not punctually mail all the while.
2) Also I suspect the name DJ Pattrson, may have been carefully chosen. Note the author calls herself 'EJ' (and 'DJ' sort of rhymes). I tried jumbling Pattrson for some meaningful word, but could not get any.
Re: Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone comes from Craigslist, you can at least Google for their name, try to find a Facebook page, etc... BEFORE they enter your house. At best, the way it is for the author, she could have done some checking, but at that point the freak is already in her house.
> If someone comes from Craigslist, you can at least Google for their name You mean a name. Who says it's their name? The reason that we trust AirBNB and choose to host travelers is because if we do come home to find all of our things missing, AirBNB at least has a credit card on file, and can at least prove to the police that someone was staying at your place?
> AirBNB at least has a credit card on file
Might be stolen especially in the light of this case.
Re: Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't you start a business that offers competitive insurance packages to people who want to use airBnB (and similar products) instead of demanding a law that obviously would have a lot of unwanted side effects on people who _do_ know about the risks they are taking by entering this business? Protective laws have very high hidden costs. These costs are hard to quantify and routinely are neglected when discussing p…
Rental property insurance is not a brand new idea. Probably not worth to be codified as a law, after all, some may choose to bypass it, but other than that there are plenty of companies selling it (vacation properties and rentals existed long before AirBnB), and AirBnB could benefit from linking to those vendors.
Of course.
I didn't mean to say that she/he should actually start an insurance company. I wanted to point out that there are market-incentives that might motivate someone to offer such a service without the need for a law.
Re: Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emotionally devastating story, but it seems like there is an easy solution to this. Have AirBnb contract include an insurance policy (superseding the homeowners insurance) for the time of rental. Also, have Airbnb keep credit card info on hand and hold guest responsible for any damage. Pretty standard business practices.
What about regular homeowner's insurance? Surely there can be policies that can cover this kind of thing which a host can obtain on their own. AirBnB doesn't have to muddy their business model with doing insurance, let the insurance people do this.
In many places the business facilitated by Airbnb is illegal. New York state, Chicago, and many other places have strict hotel laws that forbid these kinds of informal apartment rentals. It is extremely unlikely that any one can buy an insurance policy to cover an illegal transaction.
If you read the Airbnb TOS you'll see that they are well aware of this and are just hoping that naive customers don't read the whole thing.
I expect the original poster's losses will not be covered by home owner's insurance.
http://www.nysenate.gov/press-release/illegal-hotels-bill-pa...
Re: Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, offsite is the way to go, I think. We're due to get fibre broadband here in December, and that's when the whole lot will go up to S3 monthly if not weekly. That said, I guess I'm talking about ~2TB of stuff (work data and personal data) -- wasn't there a thread somewhere that discussed the various options? I'm in the UK, rather than the US, and would rather keep my data in the EU
I tried to use Carbonite. Nice UI, simple service. But with Comcast it was going to take about 3 months to back up 400GB -- and that was with leaving my laptop on 24/7. To this day I'm not sure if it was Comcast or Carbonite that made the uploads so slow, but I've since had to rethink my offsite back up plans. Would love suggestions.
I use comcast business at home, and use crashplan pro for our laptop and Linux server backups.
The initial backup of my laptop (200gb since I included iTunes mp3 and 2 x 25gb vmware images) took a couple days when idle. After that the incrementals were basically unnoticed.
Re: Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
#249AirBnB makes us travelers vulnerable to being scammed as well. In the most recent rental, it really was a roll of the dice to see if we were going to have an apartment or not (and of course, by the time we could have contacted AirBnB to say we'd been scammed, the scammer would already have our money, due to the way AirBnB works, and their lack of any way to contact them.) I travel full time. I'm a nomad. I would rent…
Agreed. Couple of days back, I went through one AirBnB competitor http://www.quora.com/Airbnb/Will-Agriya-Burrow-be-a-threat-t... There comments suggest that HomeAway model is better and also they're adding SecondPorch.
I initially thought that their comparison http://www.launchfeed.com/launches/view/1308830151 is weird. But, that makes sense now.
Re: Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned
#250It would be interesting to see AirBnB's response to this.