It was an Airbnb host’s worst nightmare: A guest used gasoline to light the woodstove, igniting a fire that left the man badly burned, killed a family dog and left the cottage a charred ruin.

Yet local officials say there was little they could have done to prevent the October fire at 512 Upper Cherrytown Road beyond ensuring that the home passed local safety and fire regulations – which it had. The owner, local contractor Zain Eisenberg, eventually accepted an offer from Airbnb for his uninsured home.

“I have accepted the offer via email and will review the terms with my legal team shortly,” Eisenberg said.

While the fire was by no means the first time Airbnb has faced this kind of situation, it sheds light on the risks posed by a short-term rental industry that blossomed before the pandemic, surged during it, and is now subsiding.

Rochester’s housing committee recently urged the town to cap new short-term rental permits at zero, down from 40 last year and 100 in 2021. Existing permits for homes that aren’t occupied by owners at least 180 days a year now stand at approximately 180 homes, about 80 of which aren’t lived in by their owners at all, according to Town Supervisor Mike Baden. Airbnb or not, it comes down to responsibility, he said.

“The person there used gasoline to ignite a woodstove fire, and it is certainly a completely inappropriate method to start a fire,” Baden said. “An owner of a house could have made the same choice. It was a very poor choice, but there's nothing that the town could have done to stop that choice being made.”

`Loud Explosion’

According to a police report provided by Eisenberg, on the evening of Oct. 10, renter John Hemhauser heard a “loud explosion” from the front room of the Airbnb, where his boyfriend, Todd Skinner, was attempting to light a fire in the wood stove.

Hemhauser ran inside and found Skinner with his clothes on fire. They both exited and Skinner rolled on the ground to douse the flames. Hemhauser told police that when he asked Skinner what had happened, Skinner responded that had “tried to light the fire with gasoline because the wood was wet.”

Skinner tried to return to the blazing cottage to save their four dogs, but one of them died. Skinner was transported to Westchester Medical Center by helicopter for “burn injuries.”

A Nov. 9 fire investigation report by Ulster County Emergency Services confirmed that the fire started in the wood stove, where gasoline was found. In addition to the Airbnb, a neighboring structure, also owned by Eisenberg, was damaged in the fire, as was Hemhauser’s vehicle.

Eisenberg said his calls to Hemhauser and Skinner have gone unreturned, and the guests all but disappeared after the accident, even leaving their dead dog in Hemhauser’s damaged vehicle. Eisenberg’s girlfriend eventually had the animal cremated and sent the remains to an address on file for the guests.

AirCover

Eisenberg sought reimbursement for property damage under Airbnb’s host protection policy, which pays hosts for “direct physical loss or physical damage to a Host’s Covered Property caused by the Responsible Guest or an Invitee of the Responsible Guest during an Airbnb stay.”

“It protects you when a guest does something bad,” Eisenberg said. “An example that would not be covered is, let’s say… a chimney fire that happened because of lack of maintenance and cleaning.”

According to Airbnb’s website, the company’s protection policy, AirCover, provides $3 million of damage protection, $1 million in liability insurance, and a 24-hour safety line for emergencies.

Eisenberg, who has hosted on Airbnb since about 2016 but only began renting regularly over the past year, said Airbnb handed his claim to a third-party firm, Crawford & Company, which conducted an investigation.

Airbnb sometimes doesn’t make the process easy. In April 2023, an Airbnb host family in San Francisco was displaced after guests clogged a toilet and quietly checked out two days early, leaving the apartment to flood for 15 hours. Host Erika Gemzer’s viral 30-post thread on X detailed her troubles trying to justify compensation to Airbnb.

“My unreimbursed expenses have climbed to $300,379,” she wrote. “Just headaches and 146+ back-and-forth emails with Airbnb support.”

Months of emailing with Airbnb, Gemzer wrote in November, eventually ended in “a final offer” of $31,000.

One Airbnb co-owner in Accord, who asked to remain anonymous, said of the company, “They say that they give you coverage, but we just would never trust that.”

She said that she has business insurance on the units that she and several friends operate and added that they’ve installed alarms for flooding and fires that notify them directly.