You can buy insurance for absolutely anything you can think up (Mir space station hitting a target in the middle of the ocean). Of course it wouldn't be economical to build a custom insurance product for a one-night stay in an AirBnB, but the use case is general enough to probably justify an insurance product.

You are naive if you think an insurer is going to pay out for damages resulting from the formation of an illegal contract (between renter and subletter in this case), which is automatically void.

He never so much as implied that he was talking about this specific instance.

This might be old-fashioned, but I think that the very act of commenting in a thread carries an implication that you intend your comment to be relevant to that thread.

And it was tangentially relevant.

Doesn't matter. Even if such a general product existed it would be easy for an insurer to decline payout in an instance such as this. I'm guessing AirBNB will be reluctant to pay out here for similar reasons, unless it emerges that the party organized have a history of this sort of thing and AirBNB knew about prior complaints at the time they brokered the booking.

You certainly _can_ buy insurance that covers damages from per-night rentals of an apartment. But it's likely going to be more expensive than your standard renters insurance, which is unlikely to cover such.

On the one hand, this is not AirBnB's "fault", the guy should have known that if you rent your apartment out to strangers there's risk involved, and additional risks if you are violating your lease and/or state law by doing so.

On the other hand, AirBnB's business model depends on people not really recognizing these risks.

Hmm, I meant that in the context of a legitimate sublease, although the second half of that sentence does strongly imply I was referring to this stay as a valid use case. You'd get liability coverage from some plans at least.

Honestly, I think in the revision process I moved a sentence fragment astray.