Success story
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Mendel Taub launched his first short-term rental, a fully renovated home in the Poconos, and turned on Screen & Protect within weeks. Three damage incidents later, he hasn't had to confront a single guest.
Location: Poconos, Pennsylvania (owner based in Rockland County, NY)
Number of listings: 1 (sleeps 12)
Using Hostfully since: 2026
Favorite features: Screen & Protect
"I'll never, ever try to make it hard for the guest. That's one of the reasons I love Screen & Protect. The screening is automated. The only time I have to do anything is if I need to create a claim. I don't have to blame anyone. No crazy back-and-forth. I just send pictures and receipts. It’s really, really easy.”
Before
After
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Mendel Taub started his career in the travel industry over 15 years ago. But it wasn’t until the last 2 years that he began thinking about building something more meaningful and long-term, something beyond simply working to earn a living.
Traditional real estate felt boring. Hospitality didn't. “Coming from a service background, and being someone who genuinely enjoys making people happy, I realized that what many consider the hardest part of STRs — the actual hosting and guest experience — was what excited me most,” says Mendel.
He took his time finding the right property. After months of viewings, he chose the Poconos and a home most buyers would have passed on. It needed a full renovation, but its size let him host 12 guests in a market crowded with three-bedroom, eight-guest listings. Nearly a year of work later, with a professional STR designer behind every finish, Opulent Havens went live in spring 2026.
Six months in, “It's exceeding all my expectations,” with happy guests and back-to-back booking. At the same time, a brand-new home came with a brand-new worry: guest damage. Mendel had poured so much heart, money, and effort into the property. He’s been warned by other professional managers that vacationers aren't always careful. He wanted protection, but the options he'd seen required him to register and buy a policy for each guest by hand. "I knew that was not going to work with me," he says. "I'm just too busy, and I knew I was going to forget."
At the same time, he refused to turn into a debt collector, or interfere with the guest experience. Some damage programs try to recover money from the guest first, which, as Mendel points out, leads to upset guests and bad reviews. For a host whose business runs on hospitality, that tradeoff was off the table.
Mendel signed up with Hostfully on the recommendation of the STR course he'd taken. Just a few weeks after his property went live, Hostfully launched Screen & Protect, automatic guest messaging and damage protection. He decided to give it a shot.
Screen & Protect offers maximum coverage of $50,000 per booking, providing peace of mind. In Mendel’s five months with Screen & Protect, he needed to file three times. All incidents were approved quickly; he was reimbursed over $380.
That’s $380 that, without Screen & Protect, Opulent Havens would have needed to contact the guest and risk a bad review, or eat the cost. While typical home insurance may cover large catastrophic incidents with delayed timelines, Screen & Protect expedites the everyday incidents that come with a constant stream of new guests using a space not their own. It’s those everyday incidents that add up. And with up to $50,000 in protection and quick friction-free payouts, Hostfully’s Screen & Protect safeguards not just the rental properties, but just as importantly, the host and guest relationship. In the hospitality industry, ensuring those relationships remain intact is priceless.
Mendel's third guest ever messaged on a Saturday morning: the bed frame had broken while they were sitting on it. His handyman made a temporary fix so the guests could keep using it, then came back to rebuild the frame after checkout. Mendel's response to the guests? An apology and reassurance that everything was taken care of.
Caption: Claim 1: New bed became a broken bed, but Mendel recouped the cost thanks to Screen & Protect.
His documentation was simple: before and after photos, screenshots of his texts with and Venmo payment to the handyman. No formal invoice. While Mendel took a couple days to respond during review, the process was simple, and the response time impressive. Each time Mendel sent something, he received a response, an approval, or a payment within a day.
A guest's son snapped the tip off a pool cue and the guest sent Mendel a photo and an apology. "Don't worry," Mendel replied, "it's all good." It was a small item, but he decided to test the process. He submitted a photo of the broken cue and the receipt for its replacement.
Caption: Claim 2: Mendel was going to eat the cost of this destroyed pool cue, but he tried a claim with Screen & Protect, and was reimbursed for a new cue. It’s the small items that add up!
The payout came in slightly under the claim because replaced items are prorated based on age, while labor, like the bed repair, is covered in full.
During a summer of back-to-back same-day turnovers, Mendel's cleaner sent him a photo he didn't expect: a hole in the property’s brand-new bathtub. The departing group had mentioned breaking a glass or two, but nothing about the tub, which sat hidden under the pile of used towels Mendel asked guests to leave there.
With the next guests arriving that day, he patched it temporarily, apologized, and had his handyman repair it properly afterward. He never confronted the group during their stay.
This is where his documentation system paid off. Mendel keeps an inexpensive phone at the property that his cleaner uses for every walkthrough. Photos upload automatically to the Cloud with timestamps, so he has before and after evidence on hand whenever he needs it, without asking anyone to send or save anything. He submitted those photos, his handyman's messages, the payment screenshot, and the receipt for the original tub.
Caption: Claim 3: A hole in a tub could be an awkward guest-conversation, and while Mendel let the guest know about the damage, he went entirely through Screen & Protect to reimburse him for the cost of the repair.
“I’ve been really happy with Hostfully and Screen & Protect,” Mendel shares. It fits the way he runs his business. Coverage applies to every booking automatically, with the cost built into the price. There's nothing to register and nothing to remember. Across all three incidents, Mendel never had to ask a guest for money.
“One of my philosophies in this business is I'll never, ever try to make it hard for the guest.” Mendel explains. “Some of the insurance or other damage protection companies will try to first get the money out of the guest, which means you piss off the guest, which means bad reviews, right? This is one of the reasons why I love Screen & Protect. I just send the pictures of the damage, the before and after. I don't have to blame anyone," he says.
The process stays light on paperwork, too. Mendel has found there’s no “crazy back-and-forth” or detailed, time-sucking invoices. "It was very simple and very easy."
Opulent Havens is one property today, but Mendel is building a business, not a side project. "I don't want to stay with just one property," he says. And with Screen & Protect covering every booking automatically, the protection he relies on today will scale with each new property he adds, without adding another manual task to his week.
Mendel’s long-term vision is to grow Opulent Havens, expand into managing properties for other owners, and eventually make hospitality his full-time focus. For a host who measures every task by whether it's worth his time, that's the point: Hostfully handles the systems so he can focus on his next guest and his next property.
Does Mendel's story sound familiar? Let's talk.
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