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Most short-term rental operators worry about ADR, occupancy rates, and five-star reviews. But there's something far more fundamental at stake: guest safety. And right now, the industry has a problem.
Justin Ford knows this better than most. As a former firefighter and Coast Guard veteran who now runs safety training for vacation rental operators worldwide. He's seen what happens when hosts get the basics wrong. He's also seen the consequences, and they're not just tragic. They're business-ending.
In this conversation, Justin explains why the vacation rental industry can't keep treating safety as an afterthought, what guests and hosts can do to protect themselves, and why the right technology might finally close the gap between hotel-grade safety and what most short-term rentals offer today.
Justin was managing nearly 600 properties in the Northeastern U.S. when something happened that nearly destroyed his business.
"I was blindsided by something that looking back was common sense," he admits. "I had a background in safety, I'm a firefighter, and this happened to me. Could this happen to other operators? What are they doing to prepare for it?"
The answer, he discovered, was nothing. No one was preparing. No one had a safety checklist. Even the top safety organizations in the UK, US, and Canada didn't have standardized protocols for short-term rentals.
So he built one himself, working directly with insurance companies to understand what they were paying claims on. The result became the foundation of what's now known as the Breezeway Safety Inspection program.
Ask most hosts what they worry about, and they'll mention parties, property damage, maybe fires. But the single biggest cause of injuries in vacation rentals isn't dramatic at all.
"Slips, trips and falls are the number one cause of incidents in short-term rentals," Justin explains. "That's the same in your own home. It's the same commercially. But they're at a higher risk for it in a vacation rental because they're unfamiliar with that property."
The problem is compounded by what Justin calls "vacation brain" — that mental state where guests arrive thinking about where to put the groceries, where the view is, when they can crack open a beer. They're not thinking about trip hazards, unfamiliar staircases, or slippery bathroom floors.
This is where the vacation rental industry can learn from hotels. Walk into any hotel bathroom and you'll never find a rubber bath mat on the floor. Why? Because hotels learned decades ago that for guests using unfamiliar bathrooms, they’re a trip hazard. Instead, they provide a rolled-up towel that guests place down themselves.
"We need to apply that same system to everything else in a short-term rental," Justin says. "If a product is too complicated, we need to remove it. We need to get it out and get something that's much easier for them to use and understand."
While slips and falls are the most common injury, carbon monoxide poisoning is the silent killer. There have been cases where guests died from CO poisoning in short-term rentals — deaths that may have been prevented with working alarms.
So why does this keep happening?
“People still just don't understand what carbon monoxide is. They have a lot of different myths around it,” Justin says. They think it rises quickly, or stays low to the floor, or only comes from cars running in garages. The reality is far more dangerous.
"Carbon monoxide basically weighs the same amount as air and spreads evenly through the air very quickly," Justin explains. He visited an NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) lab where they demonstrated this in a shipping container. “It is such a deadly gas because it basically weighs the same amount as air and spreads so evenly through the air very quickly.”
While hosts bear the primary responsibility for safety, guests aren't powerless. Justin recommends asking specific questions before booking:
"These are simple, quick, easy questions to ask that in reality are a whole lot more important than 'do you supply laundry detergent' or 'are there makeup towels,'" Justin points out. "A makeup towel, whether it's there or not, it's not going to change your life like something producing carbon monoxide."
Red flags to watch for:
Hosts need to understand that there’s a risk of guests tampering with safety equipment. They may, for example, remove batteries from smoke alarms to hide smoking, or because the alarm went off while cooking, or even to use the batteries in a TV remote. To illustrate how dangerous this is, Justin shared that in the United States, “we've had four fatalities from smoke alarms missing batteries in them in the past one year alone.”
In one case, it was discovered that guests had removed the batteries six weeks earlier, after burning popcorn. In another, someone may have taken them for a remote control. The hosts faced criminal charges.
"As an operator, you can't do that with somebody else's life," Justin emphasizes. "You've got to take care of that immediately. Your guests can't go unprotected for a second."
The problem is that most smoke and carbon monoxide alarms weren’t designed for short-term rentals. They were built assuming a homeowner would notice a low battery warning and replace it immediately. In a vacation rental, that warning might go unnoticed for weeks or months.
This is where connected technology becomes critical. Hosts need systems that alert them immediately when a smoke alarm is unplugged, when batteries are removed, or when devices stop functioning.
One of Justin's core philosophies is designing safety systems around actual human behavior, not idealized behavior.
"The hotel industry has laid the path for us," he says. Hotels don't rely on guests reading instruction manuals or following complex procedures. They design environments where the safe choice is the obvious choice.
The challenge in vacation rentals is that most products are consumer-grade, designed with the assumption that someone will read a 25-50 page instruction manual. That's not realistic for guests with “vacation brain” who are unfamiliar with the property.
The solution: Remove complexity. If a product requires extensive instructions to use safely, it doesn't belong in a vacation rental.
While fire safety gets attention, pool drownings are actually the number one killer in short-term rentals globally. Hundreds of children die every year in vacation rental pools, all over the world.
The problem isn't just that pools exist. It's that parents let their guard down on vacation, and properties aren't equipped for emergencies.
"Just because you have a life ring out there doesn't mean it's good," Justin explains. "Some of the pool drownings we've had have been because a parent doesn't know how to swim, so they don't know how to jump in. Or there's some sort of handicap issue. They can't swim, so they can't get in the pool, and a life ring does nothing."
Instead, he suggests pool safety hooks. These tools can make the difference between life and death, allowing someone who can't swim to reach a drowning person from the pool deck.
Other pool safety essentials:
The biggest mindset shift Justin teaches is moving from "if" to "when."
"So many times I talk to operators and go, 'Wow, if we ever had an elderly person here, boy, they'd have a rough time on those stairs,'" he says. "You've got to stand there and pause and step into your rental property and go, 'All right, when there's a fire, what are my guests going to do? How are they going to get out?'"
This means asking hard questions:
"I know you don't want to accept that. I know you don't want to look at your property and go, 'when this catches on fire,' but you've got to have the mindset that when this happens, what are we gonna do?"
Here's something Justin didn't expect: operators who focus on safety report higher-quality guests.
Two years after one of his safety inspections, an operator reached out with unexpected feedback. "They said, 'Justin, one of the biggest things we noticed after you visited us is the quality of guests that we have when we started focusing on safety, and they leave the properties in better condition.'"
It makes sense when you think about it. Guests who care about staying in a safe property are also guests who care about treating that property with respect. "You want guests that care about safety," Justin says. "It just blew my mind. It makes sense, but it blew my mind."
When a vacation rental fire makes the news, it doesn't just hurt that operator. It damages the entire industry's reputation.
Two weeks before this conversation, a fire started in a fireplace at a vacation rental in Indio, California. Fortunately, no one was injured or killed. But the local market's response was predictable: "Holy smokes, these things are dangerous. What are we going to do? Vacation rentals are scary."
"When one incident happens to one operator, it affects all of us," Justin emphasizes. "Even though you're not going to get a fine for not doing it, you need to realize that it's going to crack your bottom dollar and it's going to hurt our business if we don't."
The major booking platforms — Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo — face a difficult position when it comes to safety.
Justin's view has evolved over the years. "For a long time, I've argued that they need to educate and make the operators aware. And I get how hard that is for them to do from a business perspective."
If Airbnb said they had to verify every property was safe before listing, "that'd be the end of it." The industry needs these platforms, so putting full liability on them isn't realistic.
But there are things they could do:
The ultimate goal is to educate guests so they demand safety features. When guests start asking for them, the market will respond.
Justin has wanted better safety technology designed specifically for vacation rentals. Most smoke alarms and CO detectors were built for homeowners, not for properties with rotating guests.
What's needed:
Justin would also like to see technology that can detect pool emergencies, notify when electrical breakers trip, and "I want to know that a guest took a fire extinguisher out of the bracket," he says. "Because now I know I've got to inspect it."
The good news is that this technology is starting to exist. Minut’s A1 is a smoke and CO alarm designed for short-term rentals that tests itself between bookings and sends real-time tamper alerts.
Justin recently asked property managers on LinkedIn where their commitment to safety was displayed on their websites, because so few clearly communicate it.
"It's because they don't have one," he says bluntly. "They don't and they don't know and they should know."
Some operators have admitted they know they have safety issues but aren't ready to address them yet. They're waiting for... something. A regulation? An insurance requirement? A lawsuit?
"At some point in time, you've got to answer this question and go, 'Are we committed to guest safety?'" Justin says. "Because that's the foundation of what our industry is built on."
“You can't have hospitality without caring for your guests. And you can't care for your guests unless you put safety first.”
Imagine this scenario: Justin goes on global news and says, "The vacation rental you're going to stay in tonight doesn't have good smoke alarms. They probably haven't checked it. But the hotel down the road has gone through all kinds of government fire inspections. Where do you want to stay?"
"I guarantee you a ton of people would cancel their bookings," he says.
The vacation rental industry has somehow accepted that safety standards can be lower than hotels. Guests expect a certain level of safety in a hotel. They don't yet have that same expectation for vacation rentals.
But that could change quickly, potentially with one bad news cycle.
"If I went to my guest tonight and said, 'You know what? I don't have a good smoke alarm in there. I don't even know if the carbon monoxide alarm is working. But I've got a really good view. You're going to have a wonderful stay.' Would they continue to stay there?"
The answer is obvious. And if guests wouldn't stay knowing the truth, hosts need to fix the problem.
"Too many folks in this industry are focused on ADR," Justin says. "What's the next thing? I got to put a pickleball court in. I need a lazy river. I've got to add neon lights. I got to put the Pegasus unicorn in my pool for marketing photos — and they have not put safety out there."
His message is simple: Safety over ADR.
"Safety has to be first and everything will flow better. Trust me. It always does. Everybody who focuses on it has better quality."
The technology exists. The knowledge exists. The insurance incentives exist. What's missing is the industry-wide commitment to make safety non-negotiable.
💡 Want to learn more about how technology can support safety and operational efficiency in property management? Discover Minut’s privacy-first sensor.
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