Savannah is one of the best short-term rental markets in the Southeast, and it’s not close. Millions of visitors a year, a historic district people cross oceans to see, and a beach twenty minutes away on Tybee. If you own a vacation rental here — or you’re about to — you’ve probably done the math on nightly rates and occupancy.
Now do the math on this: the moment paying guests start sleeping in your property, your homeowners insurance likely stops working. Renting your home to strangers is a business activity, and homeowners policies exclude business activity. A guest fire, a guest injury, a guest lawsuit — a standard policy can deny all of it, and “I didn’t know” doesn’t reopen the claim.
Vacation rental insurance — short-term rental (STR) coverage — is the policy built for exactly what you’re doing.
Platform protections like Airbnb’s AirCover and Vrbo’s liability program are genuinely useful, and they’re genuinely not a substitute for insurance. A few reasons owners get burned relying on them alone:
Think of platform protection as a nice backstop. Your own STR policy is the actual wall.
Fire, wind, guest-caused damage, burst pipes — the building is covered as what it is: a rental operating as a business. On the coast, expect the same wind/hail deductible considerations as any Savannah-area property, and remember that flood coverage is still separate — critical for Tybee and low-lying properties.
A well-furnished rental holds real money: beds, sofas, TVs, kitchenware, linens, patio sets, décor. STR policies cover it as business property — including damage guests cause.
The big one. A guest falls down the stairs of a historic townhouse, gets hurt at the pool, or trips on a dock. STR liability is written for paying guests — a fundamentally different legal exposure than a social visitor — with limits sized for lawsuits, typically $1 million or more.
If a covered loss takes your calendar offline — a kitchen fire in March that cancels your spring bookings — this replaces the income while repairs happen. For a property that clears several thousand dollars a month in season, this coverage often pays for the whole policy.
Pools, hot tubs, fire pits, bicycles, kayaks, the golf cart guests use to get to the beach — every amenity that makes your listing rank higher also raises your risk. A good STR policy accounts for each one; a bad one excludes them in the fine print.
Occasional hosting — renting your own home a few weekends a year, say during St. Patrick’s Day when half of Savannah lists their place — can sometimes be handled with a home-sharing endorsement on your homeowners policy. Cheaper, simpler, but limited.
A dedicated vacation rental — a Tybee beach house on a rental program, a historic district carriage house on Airbnb year-round — needs a true STR or landlord policy with the business-level coverages above.
A mix — you use it some, rent it some — is the trickiest to insure correctly and the most common situation we see. The honest answer depends on your booking calendar, and that’s a conversation, not a checkbox.
One more local note: Savannah and Tybee Island both regulate short-term rentals with their own permitting and zoning rules. Requirements change, so verify with the city — but from an insurance standpoint, operating legally and being insured accurately go hand in hand. A policy that doesn’t know your property is an STR is a claim waiting to be denied.
Expect to pay more than a standard homeowners policy on the same property — commonly somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 2 times as much, reflecting the added liability and guest wear. Coastal location, wind exposure, amenities like pools and hot tubs, and your revenue all move the number. Two ways to keep it in check: safety equipment (monitored smoke and water-leak sensors, pool fencing, exterior cameras at entries) and comparing carriers — the STR market has grown quickly and pricing varies more than almost any line we quote.
We insure vacation rentals and short-term rental properties across the greater Savannah area and the Georgia coast, including:
Savannah, Pooler, Garden City, Port Wentworth, Bloomingdale, Thunderbolt, Tybee Island, Vernonburg, Rincon, Springfield, Guyton, Richmond Hill, and Pembroke.
From historic district townhouses and Starland cottages to beach houses on Tybee Island, riverfront getaways in Thunderbolt, and event-weekend rentals near Pooler, we insure properties the way they actually operate.
STR insurance is where the details bite hardest: whether your policy covers direct bookings, how it treats the months you stay in the property yourself, whether the hot tub is excluded, what your named-storm deductible really is, and how lost income gets calculated in a market as seasonal as ours. We ask those questions up front, shop carriers that actually want short-term rental business on the Georgia coast, and coordinate the STR policy with your flood coverage and umbrella so the whole portfolio holds together. And we’re local — we know what a March calendar in Savannah is worth.
If the property is on Tybee, near the marsh, or anywhere low-lying — yes, and lost-income protection makes the flood conversation even more important for a rental than a residence.
