Carbon Monoxide Safety in Hotels and Short-Term Rentals

You checked into a beachfront Airbnb with your family, spent the evening grilling outside, and woke up the next morning with a pounding headache and nausea. Your partner feels the same way. You blame the seafood, until you step outside and feel better within minutes. Then your teenager mentions the gas water heater in the utility closet smelled "weird" last night. CO incidents in hotels and short-term rentals are uncommon but real, and they are easy to miss because the early symptoms feel like jet lag, dehydration, a hangover, or the flu. This page covers where the risk comes from in lodging, the warning signs guests should recognize, what to do immediately, the legal duties that fall on hosts and operators, and practical prevention steps that are reasonable, not paranoid.

This is general safety information, not medical advice. If a CO alarm sounds or you suspect exposure, move to fresh air and contact emergency services.

In 60 Seconds

CO poisoning can happen in hotels and rentals. Pool-heater exhaust, gas water heaters, fireplaces, and attached garages are the recurring sources in US incident reports.
Early symptoms mimic ordinary travel complaints: headache, nausea, dizziness, fatigue.
The hardest red flag to miss: several people in the room feel sick at the same time, and everyone improves outdoors.
Independent review counted 905 hotel-guest exposures in 115 US incidents between 2005 and 2018, with 22 deaths, per the Jenkins Foundation hotel-incident database.
If you suspect CO, leave the building first, call emergency services from outside, then notify the property.
For added safety, pack a portable CO detector and place it on the nightstand.

Where CO Comes From in Lodging

Hotels and rentals share many of the same CO sources as homes, but travelers are at a disadvantage. They do not know the building, cannot inspect the equipment, and may sleep through early warning signs in unfamiliar surroundings.

Source	Where It Happens	Risk Level
Faulty gas boiler or water heater	Mechanical rooms, utility closets near guest rooms	Moderate to high if poorly vented
Fireplace or gas logs with blocked flue	Guest rooms with decorative or functional fireplaces	High during use if flue is obstructed
Attached or underground garage	Rooms adjacent to or above parking structures	Moderate, exhaust can infiltrate through gaps
Pool heater or spa equipment	Mechanical rooms adjacent to ground-floor rooms and indoor pool decks	High; the recurring cause in mass-casualty hotel cases
Portable generator during outage	More common in rentals than large hotels	High if run indoors or too close to the building

Wood-burning fireplaces in cabins and chalets are second only to attached garages as a CO source for mountain rentals, and they are rarely flagged in booking descriptions. If your rental has a fireplace, use it only with a working CO alarm in the same room and the flue confirmed clear before lighting.

For Guests and Travelers

Warning Signs to Recognize

CO is odorless and invisible, so your senses are useless here. Watch for patterns instead:

Headache, dizziness, weakness, nausea, chest discomfort, confusion, especially if symptoms start or worsen in the room.
Worse at night or in the morning after sleeping in the same room.
Multiple occupants affected at once: family members or travel companions all feeling ill.
A CO alarm sounding or chirping. Do not dismiss unfamiliar beeping in a hotel room. See CO detector beeping for pattern help.
Symptoms ease when you leave the building: a classic indicator that the indoor environment is the problem.

What to Do Immediately If You Suspect CO

Leave the room and building. Get to fresh air right away. Do not pack, do not search for the source.
Call emergency services from outside if anyone has symptoms or if a CO alarm sounded.
Notify the front desk or host from a safe location, not from inside the room.
Do not re-enter until the area has been checked with a calibrated CO meter and cleared by responders.
Seek medical evaluation if symptoms occurred; tell the medical team you suspect CO exposure so they can run the appropriate testing.

For a full emergency response checklist: what to do if a CO alarm goes off.

Before You Book

Before confirming a reservation, especially at a rental property with fuel-burning appliances, ask the host or property manager:

Does the property have working carbon monoxide alarms? When were they last tested or replaced?
What type of heating does the property use? (Gas furnace, propane heater, wood stove, electric. This helps you gauge the risk level.)
Is there an attached garage or enclosed parking area near the unit?
When were fuel-burning appliances (water heater, furnace, fireplace) last professionally serviced?
Is there a gas fireplace or wood stove? Has the chimney or flue been inspected this season?

Not every host will have answers to all of these, and that is fine. The fact that you asked signals that safety matters to you, and may prompt the host to check. Airbnb's CO detector listing is voluntary in most markets, and many hosts post properties without disclosing detector status until asked. Treat absence of disclosure as absence of detector until you confirm otherwise. If the property has no CO alarms and uses gas appliances, bring a portable CO detector or pick a different listing.

After You Check In

A 60-second walk-through after check-in reduces your risk more than any booking-time question:

Look for CO alarms on bedroom and hallway ceilings, near gas appliances, and outside sleeping areas. If none are visible, ask the front desk or host.
Check the alarm status: press the test button if accessible. A chirping alarm may signal a low battery or an expired unit (typically 7-10 years from manufacture).
Glance at vents and combustion appliances: look for soot, staining, or unusual discoloration around heaters, fireplaces, or water-heater closets.
Note the nearest exit from your room so you can move quickly if anything goes wrong.
Set up your portable detector if you brought one, ideally on the nightstand at breathing height. See CO detector placement for details.

For Hosts and Operators

Legal Requirements by Property Type

State law on CO detectors in lodging is uneven. Some states require an alarm in every guest room. Others apply only to buildings with fuel-burning appliances or attached garages. Several states have no statute on lodging and defer to local code. For the full state-by-state breakdown, see our CO detector laws overview and rental CO detector requirements. The 47 states with dedicated hotel and short-term rental subpages on this site (linked further down) carry the most detailed operator duties, including placement, power source, and replacement intervals.

Most state hotel CO statutes reference NFPA 720 for the technical specifications, a standard that no longer exists. Its 2015 edition was the last one published, and the withdrawal came three years later: the NFPA Standards Council approved it on 14 August 2018, in the Annual 2018 revision cycle, moving the material into NFPA 72, where it has appeared since the 2019 edition with household CO alarms in Chapter 29. If your state law says "in accordance with NFPA 720" without an effective date, your installer should be following the current NFPA 72 requirements in practice.

Liability Without CO Detection

Civil exposure for hosts and operators reaches well beyond the cost of a 30-dollar alarm. The Boone, NC, manager faced three felony manslaughter charges after the 2013 Best Western deaths. The Pennsylvania Best Western Plus in Dunmore was shut permanently the day after its 2014 mass exposure when inspectors found a rusted-off pool-heater vent and a disconnected hot-water exhaust. The Mesa, AZ, Holiday Inn Express now defending a 2023 civil suit had performed unpermitted water-heater work, according to the complaint, and had no functioning CO alarms in the affected rooms. Criminal exposure varies by state, but the civil track is durable: families and survivors recover seven and eight-figure settlements when the operator's inspection records are thin or absent.

Best Practices Beyond Minimum

Test alarms monthly, not annually as some statutes allow. Battery failure is the most common reason an installed unit does not sound.
Keep a written inspection record: date, who tested, result, alarm serial number and install date. In civil litigation, the missing inspection log is the operator's worst exhibit.
Disclose detector status in the listing, not only on the in-room placard. Airbnb's "CO detector" filter passes guests who specifically search for it; opting in expands your bookings.
Provide the alarm model and install date on request. A guest who asks is the one most likely to notice if the unit fails.
Replace per the manufacturer's end-of-life mark, generally 7 to 10 years from manufacture. Electrochemical sensors degrade and silently fail before they alarm.
Service pool heaters and combustion appliances on a documented schedule with a licensed contractor, not the in-house handyman. The recurring cause in mass-casualty hotel CO cases is the same: an unmaintained pool-heater exhaust adjacent to occupied rooms.

Documented CO Incidents in Lodging

Four cases that shape the modern lodging-CO conversation, all publicly documented in mainstream coverage and on the Jenkins Foundation hotel-CO incident database:

Mexico City Airbnb, October 2022

Three US travelers in their thirties died in a short-term rental during a Day of the Dead trip: Kandace Florence (Virginia Beach business owner), Jordan Marshall and Courtez Hall (New Orleans schoolteachers). A water heater in the apartment was the source, according to the families' attorney; building security guards noticed a strong gas smell and discovered the bodies. The smell was the odorant in the fuel gas, not the carbon monoxide, which has none. The case revived calls for Airbnb to require detectors rather than rely on host opt-in, and the families filed wrongful-death claims naming Airbnb and the host.

Best Western, Boone, NC, April and June 2013

Daryl and Shirley Jenkins, a married couple in their seventies, died in Room 225 in April 2013. Eleven-year-old Jeffrey Williams died in the same room two months later, on June 8. Investigators traced the CO to a corroded exhaust pipe on the swimming-pool water heater venting upward through unsealed fireplace openings into Room 225. North Carolina passed a hotel CO alarm statute later in 2013, and Best Western's corporate board mandated CO alarms in every guest room across its North American hotels by December 1, 2014. The accountability ended thinner than the charges suggested, and that is the part most retellings stop before. The operator, Damon Mallatere, was indicted on three counts of involuntary manslaughter and one of assault; on 28 March 2016 Appalachian Hospitality Management pleaded guilty and the charges against him were dropped. The contractor's licence suspension was overturned by the North Carolina Court of Appeals on 20 September 2016. Jeffrey Williams's mother, Jeannie Williams, 49, was in the room with him and survived.

Quality Inn pool room, Niles, MI, March 2016

Bryan Douglas Watts, 13, of Niles was at the hotel's indoor pool when a malfunctioning pool-heater exhaust pushed CO concentrations on the pool deck and in the maintenance room to 800 parts per million. OSHA sets no evacuation threshold for carbon monoxide; what it sets is a permissible exposure limit of 50 ppm averaged across an eight-hour shift, and the pool deck was at sixteen times that. Watts died on the way to hospital. Eleven other people, six of them children, were taken to Memorial Hospital of South Bend. The hotel had no CO alarm in the pool area; Michigan's residential CO rule covered sleeping quarters under certain conditions, but not the pool deck where the children were found.

Best Western Plus, Dunmore, PA, August 2014

A police officer called to the hotel for two ill guests called the fire department after his own meter spiked. About 200 people were evacuated and 30 went to the hospital by school bus; CO readings inside reached 300 ppm in some rooms. Pennsylvania regulators found the pool-heater exhaust system rusted off its vent connection and the gas hot-water exhaust disconnected from the chimney; the property was permanently closed the next day. The Best Western chain-wide alarm mandate followed roughly a month later.

These four cases share a pattern. Pool heaters and large gas appliances installed adjacent to occupied rooms, exhaust paths that fail silently without inspection, and detectors that were absent, expired, or never installed in the affected room. Most hotel chains still do not publish detector status on the booking page; guests learn whether a working alarm was present only at check-in, or after an incident.

Hotels vs Short-Term Rentals: Different Risk Profiles

Large hotels usually have professional maintenance, regular inspections, and code-compliant alarm systems. The CO risk, while real, is generally lower in chain hotels because equipment is serviced routinely and shared systems are monitored. Short-term rentals (Airbnbs, VRBOs, cabins, mountain houses) can carry a different profile:

Less consistent maintenance: owners may not service gas appliances on a schedule.
Older equipment: fireplaces, wall heaters, and water heaters in older properties may not meet current safety standards.
No on-site staff: at 2 a.m. there is no front desk to call. You wait for emergency services on your own.
Variable alarm coverage: some hosts install per platform guidance, others do not.

A 2018 study in the journal Injury Prevention found that 57.5 percent of US-based Airbnb listings reported having a CO detector. As of 2024, only 2.3 percent of the platform's roughly seven million active listings had received a detector through Airbnb's free distribution program, per the company's own statement to NBC News. NBC's investigation also linked 19 CO deaths to Airbnb stays over the prior decade.

Most rentals are well maintained, and most stays are uneventful. Travelers who get hurt tend to be the ones who assume institutional safety standards apply automatically. Confirm an alarm is present, know the exits, and consider a portable detector. Institutional safety standards do not arrive with the keys.

Reporting an Incident

If you suspect a CO exposure during a stay, document it before you check out. Good records prevent repeat incidents for the next guest and support any civil claim:

Record dates, address, room number, symptoms, and any alarm activations.
Request that management confirm inspection results and corrective actions in writing. Do not accept verbal assurance that "the detector was tested": ask for the inspection log, the dates, and the technician's name. Many state laws require operators to keep these records; few audit compliance.
Report to local authorities (fire department or health department) and the booking platform's safety channel.
If you used a portable CO monitor, save readings, timestamps, and any data export.
Photograph the room: the alarm location (or its absence), visible vents, soot or staining, model and date stickers on water heaters or fireplaces.

Your report may trigger an inspection that protects the next guest. Many jurisdictions take lodging CO complaints seriously when symptoms or alarm activations are documented, especially after the Boone, NC, and Dunmore, PA, cases.

How Many States Reach Lodging, Counted Here

Travel and short-term-rental coverage repeats a figure: only 14 states require carbon monoxide alarms in hotels. This site holds the lodging question for every US jurisdiction, so the claim can be checked rather than argued about. Of the 51 jurisdictions tracked, 46 have a carbon monoxide requirement that reaches hotels or short-term rentals outright, 5 reach it only under a condition each state page names, and none came back negative on a documented check.

The conditional group repays a slow read. A conditional answer here means somebody traced the instrument and found a test inside it, so the property decides the outcome rather than the state line. What each one turns on:

Colorado turns on whether the town or county enforces building standards of its own, since the State Housing Board code fills the gap where none exist.
Georgia turns on a test its own state page sets out.
Idaho turns on the date the building was finished, since the state fire code covers newer hotels in every county and reaches an older one only on the fire code official's judgment of a distinct hazard.
Mississippi turns on the height of the building first, and then whether the county has adopted a code of its own that displaces the state one.
Texas turns on whether the property sits inside a city limit, and whether that city has struck the alarm requirement by ordinance.

An operator can settle any of these from the deed and a phone call to the local building or fire authority. Each state page carries the full test with the citation behind it.

Nothing is left unestablished. Every one of the 51 jurisdictions has been read against its own instrument, so there is no range to hedge inside any more: all 51 reach lodging in some form, 46 of them outright and 5 on a test the property answers rather than the state line. The figure to compare against the circulating one is 46, and it is more than three times 14. While this research still had holes, the unestablished count sat at 14 itself for a stretch, which matched the claim by arithmetic and nothing else; that coincidence is gone and nobody here has traced where the original figure came from.

Counted from the lodging applicability field across all 51 jurisdiction records at build time, so this paragraph moves when the underlying research does.

Hotel CO Detector Laws by State

Each of these states has a page carrying the operator duties, the enforcement route, the penalties, and the citation the rule sits on. States outside the list either rely on building code alone, carry no explicit lodging mandate, or have not been established here yet, and the counts above say which is which.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you get carbon monoxide poisoning in a hotel room?

Yes. It is not common, but cases are well documented. The risk comes from poorly vented combustion equipment (boilers, pool heaters, fireplaces) or exhaust drifting in from attached garages or pool-equipment rooms. Independent academic review counted 905 hotel-guest CO exposures in 115 US incidents between 2005 and 2018, with 22 deaths.

How do I know if a hotel has carbon monoxide detectors?

Look for alarms on bedroom and hallway ceilings, near combustion appliances, and outside sleeping areas. If none are visible, ask the front desk; requirements vary by jurisdiction and not all hotels must place an alarm in every room. A reasonable backup is to travel with a portable CO detector.

If my symptoms stop when I go outside, does that prove it was CO?

It is suggestive, not conclusive. Many conditions improve in fresh air. Treat the pattern as a safety warning, leave the room, and have the space cleared with a calibrated CO meter before returning.

Should I call the host or emergency services first?

If anyone has symptoms or an alarm has sounded, leave the room, get to fresh air, and call emergency services from outside. Notify the front desk or host after the call, not before.

Do Airbnbs legally require CO detectors?

Requirements vary by state, country, and city. Airbnb does not mandate detectors on its platform but encourages hosts to install them and offers a free combination unit in many regions; participation has stayed under 3 percent of active listings as of company statements in 2024. Independent academic review in 2018 found that 57.5 percent of US-based listings reported a CO detector.

Who is liable if I get carbon monoxide poisoning at an Airbnb or hotel?

Civil liability generally falls on the operator or host under premises-liability law: the duty is to maintain combustion equipment, vent paths, and detection. Holding companies, franchisees, and the contractors who serviced the equipment are routinely named alongside the property. Criminal exposure depends on state law and on whether inspectors find a deliberate code violation. In Boone, NC, the operator was indicted on three counts of involuntary manslaughter, the management company then pleaded guilty and his charges were dropped, and the contractor’s licence suspension was later overturned on appeal. Insurance carriers and platforms (Airbnb, VRBO) may be co-defendants depending on the contract and the facts.

Does travel insurance cover carbon monoxide poisoning?

It depends on the policy. Standard trip-cancellation cover rarely lists CO by name and usually triggers only when you cancel before departure for a covered reason. Comprehensive medical-and-evacuation policies (Allianz, IMG, World Nomads tiers above the basic plan) generally do cover emergency treatment, hospitalization, and medical evacuation arising from accidental CO exposure. Read the policy: look for "accidental injury" coverage, exclusions on "negligence of property owner," and the limits on out-of-network hospital care abroad.

Sources & References

Last updated: May 17, 2026