Who damages a Toronto Airbnb? Usually someone who lives twenty minutes away
Ask an owner what they’re afraid of and it’s never the family from Vancouver. It’s the party. And a report out this week puts a number on something we’ve seen for years: the guest most likely to wreck your place is the one who could have driven home.
Truvi, a company that screens guests and insures short-term rentals against damage, went through 95,000 of the bookings it covered between January and September this year and looked at which ones ended in a damage claim. Guests who booked a place within about 30 km of their own address were 72% more likely than average to be involved in an incident. Guests who had travelled 1,600 km or more were among the safest. Same-day bookings were 60% more likely to end badly. Houses had about two and a half times the incident rate of apartments, and a house with five or more “fun” amenities (hot tub, pool table, sauna) ran at more than double the average.
Why nearby guests are the risk
It’s not that Torontonians are worse people than tourists. It’s what a local booking is usually for. Someone from Mississauga doesn’t book a three-bedroom in Leslieville for the weekend to see the CN Tower. They book it because their own place isn’t big enough, or their landlord or parents wouldn’t allow what they have planned. Add a same-day booking, which leaves no time for anyone to look at the reservation, and a house with a hot tub, and you’ve described most of the party bookings we’ve ever had to deal with.
Truvi’s earlier dataset (91,000 bookings, published in July) said the same thing with different numbers: local guests 80% above average, same-day 59%, guests aged 18 to 24 44% above, and, oddly, stays of three to four weeks the riskiest of all, at more than two and a half times average. Their analyst’s caveat applies to all of it: these are one company’s insured bookings, each factor was measured on its own, and none of it predicts what one particular guest will do. Treat it as a map of where the risk concentrates, not a verdict on anyone.
What we do about it
Every manager says they “screen guests”. Most of the screening that matters is two settings inside Airbnb that a lot of owners never open.
Turn off Instant Book, or limit it. Under Booking settings, Airbnb gives you three choices: approve every booking automatically, approve automatically only guests who have stayed on Airbnb before without issues, or review every request yourself. Airbnb pushes the first one hard (the page tells you similar listings with Instant Book “came up in 50% more searches”), and for a studio downtown that’s a fair trade. For a house, or anything with a hot tub, we’d rather lose a little search placement than approve a same-day booking from someone with no reviews at 4pm on a Friday. “Review all booking requests” means a person looks at every reservation before it’s confirmed: who they are, how far they’re travelling, how many guests, why a two-night stay in their own city. Damon Skinn, who manages properties for HostSavvy and has been running short-term rentals for five years, puts most of our listings on the middle setting. “Instant Book for guests with a good track record is the one I recommend. You keep the search placement, and the people who book without asking are the ones Airbnb already knows behaved last time. Everyone else sends a request, and I read it.” If you can’t bear to give up Instant Book entirely, that’s the setting to use.
Pay good guests to choose you. Airbnb’s top-rated guest discount gives a percentage off to guests rated 4.8 or higher with at least three reviews. Set it at 10 to 15% and you’ve tilted your calendar toward people with a track record, which is the single best predictor Truvi found in the other direction: long travel distance and a review history. Airbnb says only about one listing in ten in Toronto offers it, so it also makes you stand out to exactly the guests you want.
Neither setting is a guarantee. They’re how you make sure the booking that arrives tonight, from someone with no reviews and an address in the 905, gets looked at by a person before the keys do.
The house with the hot tub
If you own a house rather than a condo, and especially one that’s set up for groups, the numbers say you carry more of this risk than the owner of a one-bedroom downtown. That doesn’t mean don’t rent it. Houses with a hot tub and a yard are exactly what families and visiting relatives pay a premium for, and they’re a large share of what we manage. It means the screening has to be tighter and the house rules have to be enforced, not just written.
For an investment property that can’t be rented short-term under Toronto’s rules anyway, the same report has a side note worth knowing: Truvi found furnished stays of three to four weeks had the highest incident rate of any length. We’d read that as “screen your mid-term guests as carefully as your weekend ones”, not as a reason to avoid 28-night rentals, which are the only legal route for a place you don’t live in.
Direct bookings
One more finding that matters if you’ve ever been tempted to take a booking off-platform to save the fees. Truvi’s direct bookings ran at 1.85 times the average damage risk in the new report, up from 1.34 in the spring. Direct bookings skip the platform’s identity checks and review history, and there’s no Airbnb to call afterwards. We take direct bookings on some listings, but with the same checks a platform would run, and with a card on file for damage. If a manager offers you “more direct bookings” as a selling point, ask what they do to screen them.
What to ask a manager
If you’re interviewing managers, this report gives you three questions that separate people who have thought about damage from people who haven’t:
- What do you do differently with a same-day booking from a local address?
- Is Instant Book on, and what has to be true for a guest to use it?
- When a booking goes wrong at night, who answers, and what have they actually done in the past?
If the answer to the third one is a story, you’re talking to the right people. That’s what we do for owners across Toronto, and if you want to know how we’d run your place, tell us the address.
Sources
- Truvi, STR Risk & Resilience Report 2026 (95,000+ protected bookings, January to September 2026; full report by download).
- ShortTermRentalz, “Local guests carry highest STR damage risk”, 20 October 2026, reporting the report’s findings.
- Truvi, “Where does STR risk actually sit? What our data tells us”, Oriol Roqué Paniagua, 2 July 2026 (91,451 bookings, earlier dataset).
Last updated: October 21, 2026.