An Airbnb rental agreement is a legal contract between you and your guests, which sits outside of the Airbnb platform, giving you additional legal protection in any guest malpractice event. But what should you put in the rental agreement? How do you send it to your guests? And what are the downsides? Let’s find out, shall we!
This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a good place to start—and obviously, to make your rental agreement legally binding, you’ll want to get it checked off by an expert to make sure it stands up to scrutiny in your jurisdiction.
Airbnb stipulates that you must make your guests aware of your rental agreement BEFORE they make their booking. Failure to do this will render them null and void.
This means that you’ll have to provide access to the rental agreement within your listing description.
Once you’ve covered that, and your guests are aware of the agreement they are entering into, you’ll need to send this to them once they’ve booked. This can be done as part of your message flow after a guest confirms their booking.
Hospitable allows you to schedule a message after a new reservation. This is just perfect for sharing your rental agreement with your guests.
We will detect and answer questions on your behalf, send fully custom messages triggered by events, and much more!
Then comes the hard part. Getting your guests to sign the damn thing and send it back to you!
Once that’s done, the process is complete.
Adding a rental agreement to your booking flow on Airbnb doesn’t come without its pitfalls and downsides, which are well worth considering before you choose to proceed further:
Adding a rental agreement that your guests must sign and return to you adds considerable friction to the booking process. And, any additional friction will ultimately reduce your booking rate—which is worth thinking long and hard about.
How much friction will it add, and how many potential bookings will you lose because of it?
Who knows, but this is certainly worth weighing up before blindly plowing ahead.
This rental contract is between you and your guests and has nothing to do with Airbnb the company whatsoever.
Therefore you won’t be getting any help from them as an intermediary in the case of any disputes.
Instead, any disputes will need to go through the regular legal process, often involving lawyers and courts, which can get expensive.
If you’re a busy host (which I hope you are), then building a new contract for every new booking that comes in can be a bit of a headache.
Plus, on top of that, there’ll be a lot of chasing guests for signed contracts along the way too.
With Hospitable, you can automate your hosting routine and save time on guest communication, team tasking, calendar syncing, and more.
Start today with a 14-day free trial!
Nobody likes being told what to do, right?
And if your rental agreement reads like a textbook of rule after rule of what your guests can’t do, then you’re going to lose bookings to your competitors as a result.
Ok, so we’ve looked at the downsides of Airbnb contracts, now what about the benefits?
Did you know that after a certain period of time, your guest rights change from short-stay tennant to long-term tenant—with all of the rights that come with it?
Well, it’s true. Depending on your jurisdiction, this switch can happen in as little as 30 days!
That’s where an Airbnb long term rental agreement can really come in handy. Otherwise, you could find yourself with tenants in your property that you can’t get rid of.
That’s right; you get to sleep at night knowing that you’re protected from any foul-play from guests.
When damages happen—which they inevitably will—you’ll have legal recourse to recoup the costs of these damages.
Sure, you get covered (to an extent) from Airbnb’s insurance policy, but having your own rental agreement in place is far more solid and robust.
Having a rental agreement in place will likely act as a screening process helping you to avoid troublesome guests before they ever even book.
Just like on Airbnb, it’s possible to add additional rental agreements on Vrbo too.
In fact, with Vrbo, they even let you upload the rental agreement to their system, which is pretty neat.
All the same rules and recommendations apply, so what works for your Airbnb rental contract will work for Vrbo, as well—you might just need to adjust a few bits here or there to make it fit for each platform, that’s all.
Alright, as promised, here’s a sample vacation rental agreement for you to download to help you on your way.
Go ahead and download it now.
