Fort Myers Airbnb Injury Lawyer
You booked somewhere to stay for a few nights, came home hurt, and still cannot get a straight answer about who owned the place. We can take it from here. Call 833-370-8692 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Fort Myers personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Lee County since 1993.
Airbnb Injury claims in Fort Myers
The host will say you were a guest who should have watched your step. Meanwhile you are the one with the hospital bill, the time off work and no idea whether the deck, the stairs, the gate or the water depth met any standard at all. Finding out what the law required of that property, and who was answerable for it, is our job from the first call.
Lee County’s short-term rental stock was hit harder than anywhere else in the state and a great deal of it has been rebuilt since. Docks, seawalls, lifts, decks, stairs and pool enclosures across Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel and the river and canal neighborhoods are new work, done at speed, by a labor market that was stretched past its limit. Some of it was permitted and inspected properly and some of it was not, and that distinction is a public record at the county building department. It matters more here than anywhere because the guest is almost always from out of state, arriving at a property nobody has inspected, and the features being advertised are the ones the water reaches. This office is on Colonial Boulevard rather than working the county from somewhere else.
Much of Lee County’s short-term rental stock was rebuilt after Hurricane Ian, so docks, decks, stairs and pool enclosures at these properties are recent work done at speed. Whether it was permitted and inspected is a public record. Most claims must be filed within two years.
What to do after a airbnb injury in Fort Myers
- Screenshot the listing before you report anything. The whole page: photographs, title, amenity list, house rules, the description of the stairs or the pool or the dock, and every review going back as far as it loads. A host can edit or delete all of it in five minutes and they routinely do so the same week. Screenshot rather than bookmark, because a bookmark points at whatever the page says tomorrow. This is the single most useful thing anybody does in the first day of one of these cases.
- Photograph the thing that hurt you, with something for scale. The tread, the rail, the loose tile, the missing bulb, the gap, the water. Put a shoe, a phone or a hand in the frame, because heights, gaps and depths get measured later rather than described. Photograph the whole room or the whole approach as well as the detail, so it is clear where it was. Then photograph it again from where you were walking or standing when it happened.
- Keep every message in the thread, including the ones after. What the host said when you asked about the property, what they said when you told them, what they offered, and anything a manager or a cleaner sent. Hosts frequently admit a great deal in the first hour and become careful afterward. Export or screenshot the conversation rather than trusting it to stay in the app, because accounts get closed and threads disappear with them.
- Get seen in Florida before you fly home. An urgent care or emergency room visit here anchors the injury to the property and to the date, and that record is worth a great deal later. People routinely decide to wait until they get home, and a defense lawyer then argues the injury happened somewhere between Florida and their front door. It takes an afternoon and it closes an argument that is otherwise available for the life of the case.
- Find out who actually owns the place. The county property appraiser will name the record owner from the address in about a minute, and it is regularly a company or a trust rather than the person you were messaging. Write the name down. It decides which insurance is in play, and knowing it early stops a claim being aimed at somebody with nothing behind them.
Where these happen in Fort Myers
Lee County rentals are newer than they look, and that is the single most useful fact in these files.
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Rebuilt waterfront structures
Docks, seawalls, lifts and steps replaced across the river and canal neighborhoods since the storm.
- Work done at speed by a labor market that was stretched past its limit
- Whether a permit was pulled and an inspection passed, which the county holds
- Ladders and handrails left off in the rebuild
- A riverbed and canal bottom that the storm itself rearranged
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Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel
Rebuilt and returned to the rental market fast, with guests arriving who have never seen the property.
- Elevated houses with long exterior stairs, which is where people fall
- New decking and rails, and whether either was inspected
- Pool enclosures and barriers replaced as part of a wider rebuild
- Properties changing hands during the rebuild, so the owner and the host differ
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Canal houses inland
The everyday stock, marketed on water access to families with children.
- Water too dark to judge depth from a dock above it
- Unfenced canal edges at properties advertised as family friendly
- Docks without ladders, and unlit edges after dark
- What the listing said about the water and about children
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Owners and managers who are different parties
The recurring structure here, and the reason responsibility gets denied by everybody at once.
- A record owner who is regularly a company or a trust
- A management company holding the maintenance records and its own policy
- A host account that may be neither of them
- An association where the property sits inside a community
What causes them
- Hot tubs and spas left with unbalanced chemicals, no cover, or a temperature nobody checked
- Grills, fire pits and outdoor heaters set up close to seating or under a soffit
- Locks and doors that do not work as the listing described, including a door that cannot be locked at all
- Bunk beds without rails, and lofts and mezzanines with an open edge
- Furniture that is not what it appears to be, including glass tables and unsecured wall units
- Missing or dead smoke and carbon monoxide alarms in a house nobody inspects
What actually injures people at a short-term rental
Assault and injury by another person
Where a guest is attacked at a rental, the questions are who could get in, what the locks and lighting were, and what the host or the building knew about the address already. In a building of five or more dwellings there is a statutory list of security measures that changes the analysis, and whether they were in place is a question of fact.
Falls from height, and falls on stairs
The most common serious injury at these properties, and it usually comes from work somebody did themselves. Outdoor stairs, decks, balconies and docks at Florida rentals are frequently added or replaced without a permit, and the resulting geometry is wrong in ways a guest cannot see: an inconsistent riser, a tread that is shallower than the rest, a rail that is decorative rather than structural.
Whether that work was permitted and inspected is a public record at the local building department, and it is one of the first things worth pulling.
Head and spinal injury from entering water
Diving or jumping from a dock, a seawall or the edge of a pool into water shallower than it looked. Florida water is frequently dark with tannin or stirred sediment, the bottom is invisible from above, and depth changes with tide and with the season. The property knew all of that and the guest could not.
What Florida law requires you to prove
A rental is a business, and the guest is an invited customer
The full licensing scheme, the inspection exemption and the safety requirements sit on our Florida short-term rental page rather than being restated in every market. The short version is that a place let to guests more than three times a year for stays under thirty days is treated as a lodging business under Florida law, which puts a guest in the strongest category the state recognizes rather than in the position of somebody visiting a friend.
The deadline, and the share of the blame
Most claims from an incident on or after March 24, 2023 carry two years under Fla. Stat. § 95.11, and an older one keeps the four years that applied when it happened. Fault is divided under Fla. Stat. § 768.81, and since 2023 somebody found more than half responsible recovers nothing at all. Unfamiliarity with a property is the point of renting one rather than a fault in the guest, and it is answered with what the host knew.
Where the unit sits in a building of five or more homes
Fla. Stat. § 768.0706 gives the owner or principal operator of a multifamily residential property a presumption against liability for a crime somebody else commits there, but only where a listed set of measures was substantially in place: recorded cameras at the entry and exit points held for thirty days, lit parking and walkways, a deadbolt of at least an inch in each unit door, locks on windows and sliding doors, locked gates on pool fencing, and a peephole where a door has no window beside it. That is a checklist rather than a defense, and it is checked.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide airbnb injury page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Lee County
This office has run the case that shows how fast waterfront evidence disappears here, and the lesson from it drives everything below.
- The full listing screenshotted before anything is reported, reviews included
- Photographs of the dock, the water, the stairs, the rails and the lighting, with scale
- Permit and inspection history for post-storm work, held at the county building department
- The booking, the house rules and every message with the host
- The record owner from the property appraiser, separated from the management company
- Maintenance and cleaning records, and any earlier guest complaint about the same thing
- Association records where the property sits in a community
- A Florida medical record made before flying home
Move in the first week. We were retained five days after a guest was seriously injured diving from the dock of a rental on the Caloosahatchee, and had the dock and the riverbed inspected within days. Weeks later Hurricane Ian destroyed the property and reshaped the bottom of the river. The evidence that case depended on existed only because it had already been documented.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in Fort Myers is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled airbnb injury claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.
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Richard P. Pravato Founding & Managing Attorney Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar since 2004, and by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Injury cases exclusively since 1996. Full profile → -
Brett J. Yonon Senior Trial Attorney Selected to Florida Super Lawyers in 2024 and 2025. Nearly two decades in Florida courts, including a $3.5 million funeral home negligence verdict. Full profile →
What the insurer says about a short-term rental claim
The arguments here are unusually predictable, because there are only ever four of them and they arrive in the same order.
- You accepted the house rules and the terms
- House rules are not a release, and a term buried in a booking flow does not sign away a duty to keep a property reasonably safe. Florida limits what a release can do even when somebody signs one on purpose. This argument is made because it costs nothing to make, and it is answered with what the property was actually like rather than with a debate about the paperwork.
- Nobody ever had a problem with it before
- Testable, and frequently wrong. Earlier reviews on the listing are a public complaint record written by strangers with no stake in your case, which is why they are screenshotted before the listing changes. Where a management company was involved there are also maintenance tickets and cleaner reports saying the same thing in the property’s own words.
- An early offer covering the emergency room bill
- These arrive fast in rental cases, usually while the guest is still in Florida or has just got home, and they are sized to the one bill that exists rather than to the injury. Everything that follows happens under your own doctors in another state and none of it is in the file yet. A release signed now cannot be reopened when it is.
What a claim can include
The costs a ruined trip generated
The vacation itself is not the claim. The money it cost because of the injury frequently is, and it is regularly left out because nobody thought to itemize it.
Medical care here and at home
The Florida treatment and everything that followed under your own doctors, gathered into one record rather than left as two unrelated halves.
Getting home, and being cared for once there
Changed flights, extra accommodation, medical transport, and the help hired because somebody could no longer drive, work or carry a child.
Why Wolf & Pravato in Fort Myers
A Lee County claim is filed in the Twentieth Judicial Circuit at the Lee County Justice Center, and the firm has an office on Colonial Boulevard in Fort Myers rather than a referral arrangement with somebody here. Where an out-of-state family rented a rebuilt waterfront property owned by one company and run by another, pulling the permit history and sorting out who was responsible is local work.
Richard Pravato is one of 861 lawyers Board Certified by The Florida Bar in Civil Trial law, out of a membership over 109,000. The certification is about trial experience rather than advertising spend, and it is the part of a firm’s record that an insurance company checks.
Nothing is charged for the first conversation and nothing is charged at all unless there is a recovery. If we do not think you have a claim, we would rather tell you now than a year from now.
Fort Myers airbnb injury questions
The property was rebuilt after the storm. Does that help or hurt?
It usually helps, because recent work leaves a record. Whether a permit was pulled and an inspection passed for the dock, the deck, the stairs or the enclosure is public information at the county building department, and work done without either is unusually strong evidence. It also means there are contractors, invoices and dates rather than a structure of unknown age.
How fast does the evidence really go?
Faster than people expect on this coast. Listings get edited within the week, docks get repaired, and a storm can remove the property entirely. In the Caloosahatchee case this firm handled, the dock and the riverbed were documented within days of being retained and were gone weeks later. Nothing recovers physical evidence once the water has taken it.
We flew home the next day. Is it too late?
No, and it is the usual position here. The evidence is in Lee County and so is this office. What matters from your end is the listing and the messages, and getting the treatment you have had at home joined to whatever Florida record exists so it reads as one injury rather than two unconnected episodes.
Does this cover VRBO, Booking.com and a rental arranged privately?
Yes. Florida law looks at how the property is used rather than at which website you found it on. A place rented to guests more than three times a year for stays under thirty days is treated the same way whether the booking came through Airbnb, VRBO, another site or a handshake. The platform changes the paperwork, not the duty.
The host says I agreed to the house rules and accepted the risk.
House rules are not a release, and even a signed waiver has limits under Florida law. What matters far more is what the property was actually like and what the host knew about it. Your own share of the fault does reduce what you recover, so getting the condition documented early is the practical answer to this argument rather than a debate about the rules.
The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.
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Tell us what happened
A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 1825 Colonial Blvd, Fort Myers, FL 33907.