wear and tear

The practical test is whether the damage looks like a single event or like time passing. A gouge with displaced material, a burn, a break, a stain with a defined edge: these are events, and events have a date. Dulled paintwork, thinning carpet in a walkway, loose hinges, faded fabric: these are accumulations, and no single stay owns them.

Most disputes sit between the two, which is why the physical description of the damage matters so much. Naming the mechanism, such as parallel drag marks from furniture moved without lifting, does more work than any adjective. The full treatment is in wear and tear versus guest damage.

A reviewer looking at a photograph of a marked surface has three possibilities: this stay, an earlier stay, or ordinary use. Only the first is claimable, and nothing in a single after-photograph distinguishes them. Faced with that, the defensible decision is the default.

This is not hostility. It is the same logic that closes the policy route once another guest has had access to the property, described in damage found after the next guest checked in. Access and time both destroy attribution, and the programme treats them the same way.

Some parts of a property are assumed to age faster and are therefore hardest to claim on: floors, walls and paintwork, carpets and rugs, upholstery, linens and towels, and anything with a short expected life. A claim on these needs more evidence than a claim on a broken appliance, not less.

The scratched-floor and wall cases are the clearest illustrations, and both turn on the same missing document; see scratched hardwood floors and holes and damage in the wall.

One thing: a dated record showing the surface unmarked before the stay. With it, the guest's only remaining argument is that someone else caused it during the same booking, which is not a defence. Without it, even obvious damage sits in the default.

The record does not have to be elaborate. A wide frame per room at each turnover, unedited and dated, is enough to convert the question from whether the mark is old to which stay it belongs to. The related argument about damage that was genuinely already there is covered in pre-existing damage.

Reviewers see patterns. A host who submits documented, obviously event-caused damage twice a year is read differently from one who submits marginal claims monthly. Filing a claim for a dulled walkway or a thinning towel spends credibility that the next real claim will need.

Price ordinary deterioration into the business instead, and replace tired items on a schedule rather than through the claims process. The decision framework is in when to file a damage claim and when to let it go.