Every June, during National Safety Month, the vacation rental industry has important conversations about protecting guests. Webinars are hosted, articles are published, best practices are shared, and professionals remind themselves that safety is one of the most important responsibilities in the business. Then July arrives. Occupancy climbs, cleaners race from one turnover to the next, maintenance teams become overwhelmed, property owners have questions, guests need help, and the pace of business accelerates. Without anyone consciously deciding to deprioritize safety, it quietly slips behind the next phone call, the next guest request, and the next operational challenge that simply can't wait.
That pattern has fascinated Justin Ford, Breezeway's Head of Safety Certifications, for years because, after working with thousands of vacation rental operators around the world, he has yet to meet someone who genuinely doesn't care about guest safety. Quite the opposite, in fact. Nearly every property owner, general manager, operations director, and housekeeper he's met believes protecting guests is one of the most important parts of the job. Most professional operators will proudly tell you that safety comes first, and Ford believes they mean it. Yet every year the industry continues to see preventable fires, drownings, falls from decks, carbon monoxide poisonings, furniture tip-overs, grill explosions, and countless other incidents that leave everyone asking the same heartbreaking question: How did this happen?
The answer is almost never that people didn't care.
The answer is that caring and consistently acting are not the same thing.
Along the way, Ford stopped asking why hosts and rental agencies weren't making safety a priority and started asking a different question instead: What is safety competing against? Once viewed through that lens, the answer becomes obvious.
Walk into almost any vacation rental office on a busy summer morning and you'll see exactly what that means. Before anyone has finished their first cup of coffee, the phones are already ringing. A guest can't get into their property because they entered the wrong door code. A homeowner wants to discuss their latest statement. The HVAC system stopped working at one of the most profitable rentals during a ninety-degree afternoon. Reservations wants approval to offer a discount on a last-minute booking. The head of housekeeping just called in sick, leaving dozens of arrivals to reorganize before noon. A neighbor is upset because someone from the maintenance department spun tires while leaving the driveway. Marketing wants one more email campaign approved before the weekend. Every one of those issues feels urgent because every one of them affects today's business.
The same thing happens for a host. Operating a short-term rental is usually a side gig. Other routine matters in life pull at them while their rental property may be hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.
Meanwhile, somewhere in a property, a smoke alarm quietly reached the end of its ten-year service life months ago. A deck built twenty-five years ago continues to endure another season of rain, snow, and freeze-thaw cycles. The gas grill at a lakefront property has developed a small gas leak that nobody has noticed yet. The pool gate no longer closes quite as reliably as it once did at a property a family with three young children are checking into tomorrow. Those hazards don't send emails. They don't leave voicemails. They don't demand meetings. They simply sit in the background, patiently waiting while everyone focuses on the problems that are impossible to ignore.
That, more than anything else, is why safety gets delayed. It isn't because safety isn't important. It's because safety is competing against things that feel more important today.
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Over the past several years, Ford has begun referring to this phenomenon as safety debt. Financial debt is a concept most people understand, borrowing today knowing it must be paid back later, often with interest. Safety works much the same way. Every time an expired smoke alarm replacement is postponed, every time a professional deck inspection is delayed until after peak season, every time a loose handrail is left for another month because there are simply too many other priorities, the industry is borrowing against the future. The difference is that safety debt doesn't send monthly statements. There are no overdue notices reminding anyone that interest is accumulating. Instead, the debt quietly grows until the day it comes due and when it does, payment often arrives in the form of an injury, a lawsuit, or a tragedy that everyone agrees should never have happened.
One of the reasons this debt is so easy to ignore is that safety hazards rarely appear to deteriorate overnight. Decks don't suddenly become dangerous. Smoke alarms don't all stop working at once. Fire extinguishers lose pressure gradually. Pool gates sag a little more each season. Exterior lighting becomes dimmer one bulb at a time. Even grills and fireplaces often show only subtle signs of wear long before they become hazardous. Because deterioration happens slowly, the sense of urgency fades just as slowly. The deck still looks solid. The smoke alarm hasn't caused any problems. The extinguisher gauge is probably close enough. There's always next season.
The hazard doesn't care about anyone's schedule. It simply waits until the day deterioration and bad timing happen to meet.
When Ford investigates serious incidents, he is often struck by how ordinary the days leading up to them were. There wasn't a dramatic warning. Nobody woke up expecting disaster. There was simply an aging component, a missed inspection, an overlooked maintenance issue, and eventually the wrong circumstances at exactly the wrong moment. Looking back, the warning signs usually seem obvious. Looking forward, they almost never do.
"Catastrophic failures don't usually happen suddenly. They simply become visible suddenly."
- Justin Ford, Breezeway, Head of Safety Certifications
By the time everyone recognizes the seriousness of the problem, the opportunity to prevent it has already passed.
Something else has become equally clear after reviewing incidents and speaking with operators following tragedies. Ford almost never finds hosts or rental agencies that don't care. What he finds instead are property owners and organizations full of hardworking, well-intentioned people who assumed someone else was handling the problem. At a property management company, a cleaner notices that the deck railing moves more than it should and assumes maintenance will take care of it. Maintenance believes someone already created the work order. Operations assumes the owner approved the repair. The owner assumes the management company has everything under control. With a host or their vendor, complacency can set in from repeated visits to the same property, causing gradual decline to go unnoticed. Individually, each person made a reasonable assumption. Collectively, nobody actually owned the outcome.
This is one of the greatest weaknesses in short-term rental operations: Safety belongs to everyone, which often means it belongs to no one.
Think about every other part of a vacation rental agency's business. Someone owns reservations. Someone owns accounting. Someone owns owner relations. Someone owns marketing. Those departments have goals, accountability, meetings, and people who wake up every morning thinking about how to improve them. Yet when many companies are asked who owns safety, the answer is often surprisingly vague: "Well...we all do."
For individual hosts, the challenge looks a little different, but the outcome is often the same. They are the reservations department, the accounting department, the marketing department, the maintenance department. Every day is consumed by occupancy, guest communication, reviews, expenses, cleaning schedules, and the dozens of other responsibilities that come with running a vacation rental. Yet when many individual hosts are asked who is responsible for safety, the answer is often just as unclear — a response like, "I keep an eye on it," or "I deal with issues when I notice them." Some lean on local authorities that conduct fire inspections, pointing out that the property passed. But fire accounts for only 3% of incidents, and Ford has yet to see a fire inspection completed that he would approve.
After years of watching organizations succeed and fail, Ford has become convinced that "everyone" is not an owner. Ownership requires accountability. It requires someone who reviews inspection reports, follows up on unresolved hazards, notices recurring issues across multiple properties, and asks difficult questions before an incident forces everyone else to ask them afterward. That person doesn't necessarily need to spend every hour of every day focused on safety, in many companies it may only represent part of their responsibilities. But every successful safety culture he has encountered has one thing in common: someone wakes up every morning responsible for making guests safer than they were yesterday. That simple distinction changes everything.
The encouraging news is that building a stronger safety culture doesn't necessarily require hiring another department or creating complicated new processes. In fact, many vacation rental companies and hosts unintentionally make safety harder than it needs to be by treating it as additional work instead of integrated work. Companies schedule a Safety Day, plan inspections for next month, or promise they'll focus on safety after peak season ends. Hosts often do the same, telling themselves they'll check the smoke alarms after the next guest departs, inspect the deck when bookings slow down, or finally address a lingering maintenance concern during the off-season. Unfortunately, extra work almost always loses to urgent work. Whether managing hundreds of properties or just one, safety improvements are far more likely to happen when they become part of the work already being done, rather than another item on a growing to-do list.
Ford witnessed a host who flew in to work through a property checklist, spent two weeks at the property repainting the interior, and ran out of time before having to leave — without addressing a single safety item. The host reassured themselves they'd get to it next time, as if a safety incident would wait.
The companies and hosts making the greatest progress have discovered something much simpler: they attach safety to work that's already happening.
None of those examples require another trip. None require another employee. What they require is another way of thinking.
The operators that successfully weave safety into their culture stop asking, "When are we going to have time to inspect this?" Instead, they begin asking, "What safety improvements naturally fit into the work we're already doing?" That subtle shift is remarkably powerful because it acknowledges an important truth: most vacation rental companies are never going to have extra time. The organizations making the greatest improvements aren't the ones with fewer check-ins or larger maintenance departments. They're the ones that learned how to make safety ride alongside existing operations instead of competing with them.
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Eventually something even more important begins to happen. Safety stops feeling like another program. It starts becoming part of the host or company's identity.
People often ask Ford how they'll know when their safety culture is truly changing. The answer isn't found in software dashboards or inspection completion rates. It's found in conversations. Early on, managers remind employees to report hazards. Later, employees remind one another. Someone says, "While you're there, can you also check the fire extinguisher?" A cleaner notices dull kitchen knives and creates a work order without being asked, understanding that dull knives cause more injuries than sharp ones. A maintenance technician photographs a deteriorating deck even though the day's assignment had nothing to do with decks. Employees become comfortable speaking up because reporting hazards is no longer viewed as criticism, but instead viewed as contributing to a safer organization.
Ironically, one of the first signs that a safety culture is improving is that more hazards will probably be discovered than ever before. At first that can feel discouraging. It shouldn't. Those hazards didn't suddenly appear. They were always there. The difference is that employees now feel responsible for finding them. That's not failure. That's progress.
Before joining Breezeway, Ford spent fifteen years as a firefighter. Looking back, one of the things that stands out most isn't what happened during fires — it's what happened before them. Every shift began by checking equipment. Nobody had to be reminded. Nobody assigned the task. Before entering a burning building, firefighters instinctively checked one another's gear — not because it appeared on a checklist, but because it had become part of who they were. Every firehouse develops a culture where safety becomes instinctive rather than procedural.
That's exactly where the short-term rental industry should be heading.
The goal isn't simply to build employees who complete safety inspections. The goal is to build employees and vendors who notice safety. There's an enormous difference between the two.
The cleaner who instinctively notices a missing pool safety hook, the maintenance technician who automatically checks a grill while replacing a propane tank, and the guest services representative who reminds a family about "Water Watcher" cards without being prompted aren't simply completing tasks. They're demonstrating that safety has become part of the organization's identity.
As National Safety Month comes to a close, the industry should remember that busy seasons will never disappear. Owners will always call. Guests will always have emergencies. Marketing campaigns will always need approval, and maintenance departments will probably always have more work than time. Waiting for the perfect opportunity to focus on safety is waiting for something that simply doesn't exist.
The operators that will prevent the next tragedy won't necessarily have larger budgets or more employees than everyone else. They'll simply have decided that safety is no longer something they'll get to someday. It will be something they intentionally build into every day.
Busy is inevitable. Choosing to be unsafe is not.