incident report

An incident report is the bridge between a turnover and a claim. On a short-term rental, the person who finds the damage is usually not the person who can claim it. The report carries the finding from one to the other, in a form the owner can act on without going back for more.

It is not a legal document and it is not filed with Airbnb. It is an internal record: a clean, dated summary of what happened, what it is likely to cost, and what evidence exists. Its whole job is to let the owner make a decision and file a claim quickly, while the deadline is still open.

A complete incident report has five parts. The stay: the property, the platform, the guest, the reservation code, and the checkout date. The damage: each affected item, the room, and how severe it is. The cost: a sourced range for each item, or a real quote where you have one. The evidence: which photos, receipts, and quotes exist. The deadline: how many days are left to file.

Honesty about the numbers matters. A figure backed by a receipt is worth more than an estimate, and the report should say which is which. A range labelled as typical is fine for a first pass, but the owner replaces it with the actual quote when the claim is filed.

The report is written by whoever is on site at turnover: a co-host, a virtual assistant, or the cleaner who found the problem. It is received by the owner, the host of record, whose account holds the listing and who files the AirCover claim.

Because it is a handoff, consistency is the point. When every incident is reported in the same format, the owner knows exactly where to look for the cost, the evidence, and the deadline, and nothing gets lost in a thread of messages. The co-host and VA guide to guest damage covers the full workflow around it.

The two are easy to confuse. The claim is the formal request for money, filed by the owner in the Airbnb Resolution Center and escalated to AirCover. The incident report is the evidence package that makes the claim fileable. One is submitted to Airbnb; the other is shared between the people managing the property.

Keeping them separate is useful. The report can be built the moment damage is found, by anyone, with no account access. The claim comes later, from the owner, using the report. To test how strong the eventual claim is, the owner runs it through the AirCover Claim Strength Checker before filing.

AirCover requires the claim within 14 days of checkout, or before the next guest arrives. The window opens at checkout, not at discovery, so an incident report that reaches the owner on day six has already cost them six days they cannot get back. A report built and sent the same day is worth far more than the same report a week later.

This is why a good incident report puts the deadline on the page, next to the cost. See the 14-day filing window for how the clock works and why same-day turnovers shorten it to hours.

You do not have to write an incident report from scratch. The free VA Incident Report Builder assembles all five parts for you: you answer a few questions about the stay and the damage, and it produces the report with a sourced cost range, an evidence-readiness checklist, and the filing-window countdown already worked out.

For a full walkthrough of how it works and where its numbers come from, read the tool guide.