loss of income protection

The idea is straightforward: if a guest caused damage that made the property unlettable, the nights lost are part of the loss. In practice the line is applied narrowly, and reimbursement is easier to obtain where the property was genuinely unusable rather than merely diminished.

It sits inside host damage protection rather than being a separate programme, and the wider question of what the programme pays across categories is worked through in how much AirCover actually pays.

Every other line in a claim has a third-party document behind it: an invoice, a quote, a receipt. Lost income has none. It is a projection about bookings that did not happen, which is exactly the kind of figure a reviewer is most cautious about.

The way to answer that is to make it as documentary as possible. A cancelled reservation with a booking reference is evidence. A blocked calendar with no bookings behind it is an assertion, and it is treated as one.

Show the cancellations rather than the block: the reservations that existed and were cancelled, with dates and values. Show the repair timeline from the trade, so the number of nights follows from the work rather than from your judgement. And show that the property was genuinely unusable, which is easy for a flood or a biohazard and hard for a scratched floor.

Incidents where this line dominates include water damage, specialist cleaning and anything structural. See guest overflowed the toilet and vomit and biohazard cleanup for how the nights are argued alongside the invoice.

Treat unrecovered downtime as a business cost rather than a claim to win. That means scheduling repairs to compress the outage, keeping a relationship with a trade who can attend quickly, and holding a small reserve for the incident that takes a week out of a peak month.

It also belongs in your annual risk number, which is what the free Airbnb Risk Calculator produces, and in the honest accounting of what the platform programme does and does not do, in is AirCover really free.