How to Add a Damage Waiver Fee on VRBO and HomeAway

Why the fee, not the deposit

In every case, you're the covered party. You're the one who buys the plan, and you're the one who gets reimbursed if a guest accidentally breaks something. That's true whether you pay for the plan out of your own margin or pass the cost along.

Most hosts pass it along, either through the rental rate or through a separate fee on the reservation. The guest pays it as part of booking, and you buy the plan for that stay with the proceeds. Nothing about the coverage changes based on who ultimately funds it — the plan protects you, the lodging provider, either way.

The mechanics of adding that fee are different on every listing site. VRBO and HomeAway make it straightforward. Airbnb doesn't, which is the subject of a separate guide . This one is about the two sites where the fee works the way you'd expect.

There's a reason the fee is the right tool here rather than something absorbed quietly into your rate. Coverage protects both sides of the booking: the guest doesn't have to come out of pocket for an accident, and you have an easy way to get reimbursed without going back to the guest to collect. A visible fee at booking is the version of that arrangement the guest can actually see and understand.

Adding the fee on VRBO and HomeAway

Both VRBO and HomeAway allow you to add fees to a reservation, and a damage waiver fee is exactly the kind of fee they're built to support.

That's the whole mechanism worth knowing here: the fee gets added to the reservation itself. What that fee needs to cover, and how often you need to collect it, is the more important part — that's below.

How much to charge

The fee needs to cover the plan you're buying for that stay. The $1,500 plan runs $59 at retail; the $3,000 plan runs $79. Register as a partner and both drop by $10 — to $49 and $69.

Set the fee to at least the plan's cost; anything above that is your call. The floor is the price of the plan itself — that's the part that has to be covered for the purchase to pencil out.

The $1,500 and $3,000 plans are the only two tiers, at the prices above, and the fee you set can match whichever tier you buy for that stay. For a side-by-side comparison of what each tier covers, see the Coverage page .

Every booking, not just the risky ones

Once you're participating in the program, every guest stay needs its own plan — not just the ones where you have a hunch a guest might be careless. There's no way to pick and choose which reservations get covered and which don't.

That requirement is also what keeps the price this low. Coverage at $1,500 or $3,000 for $59 or $79 only works because it's spread across every stay, not just the ones that end up filing a claim. Skip a booking here and there, and the pricing that makes this affordable stops working.

Coverage is per stay, not per property, and it tops out at a single guest stay of up to 30 days. Treating the fee as a standing line item on every VRBO and HomeAway reservation is the simplest way to keep that rule from becoming a decision you have to make each time a booking comes in.

Buying the plan when the booking lands

You buy the plan at the time of reservation, right when the guest books and the fee comes in. That's the moment to have it done, not something to circle back to later in the stay.

Saved properties make this fast: register as a partner once, save your property information, and each new reservation is a quick purchase from there instead of re-entering details every time. Head to the purchase page when the next booking comes in.

Registering also locks in the $10 partner discount on both tiers, so the fee you collect goes a little further toward covering the plan without you having to raise it. It's a one-time setup that pays off on every reservation after it, for as long as you keep buying coverage stay by stay.

If you also list on Airbnb, the fee mechanics there are different enough to need their own approach — see the Airbnb guide for the workaround.