We had guests attempt to turn off every single camera on our property. We caught the whole thing on video — because each camera points at another camera. They could not get them all.
That experience is why we are writing this post. A camera is not a camera system. One camera at the front door is a starting point, not a solution. A real security setup for a remote STR property has no blind spots, no single points of failure, and no way to disable it from outside without being recorded doing it.
This is how we built ours.
Airbnb requires hosts to disclose all cameras on the property in the listing. VRBO has the same requirement. Cameras must be disclosed, cannot be inside the property (bedrooms, bathrooms, interior living spaces), and must cover only exterior areas or common spaces explicitly listed in the disclosure.
Disclose everything. List every camera location in your listing. Do not hide cameras or place them anywhere guests have a reasonable expectation of privacy. This is both a platform requirement and in most states a legal one.
Beyond compliance: disclosed cameras deter. Guests who intend to cause problems often self-select out when they see cameras listed upfront. That is part of the value. A camera guests know about and accept at booking is more legally defensible than one they discover on arrival.
Map your property in zones before you buy a single camera. Every zone that matters needs coverage. For a cabin, those zones are typically:
Each of these zones gets at least two cameras. Not one. Two, mounted from different angles covering the same area. Here is why.
Most hosts pick one or the other. We use both at every entrance, and the reason is simple: each has a failure mode the other covers.
Plug-in cameras have a consistent power supply and generally better performance in low light. Their failure mode is power loss. If a guest trips a breaker, pulls a plug, or if the property loses power during a storm, a plug-in camera goes dark. No recording. No alert.
Solar cameras run on battery charged by a solar panel, so they keep recording during a power outage as long as their battery has a charge and your internet equipment is still running (more on that in the network section). Their failure mode is prolonged low light — a battery that has not charged adequately will eventually die. In dense tree cover or in an extended cloudy period, this is a real risk.
Mount one solar and one plug-in at each entry point, from different angles. Link them in your camera app so motion detected by one triggers recording on both. Now you have no single point of failure. Killing the power takes out the plug-in but not the solar. Draining the solar battery takes out that camera but not the plug-in. Getting both requires either knowing your setup in detail or getting very lucky. Most guests who cause problems are not that sophisticated.
This is the design principle that matters most. Every camera on your property should be visible to at least one other camera. The goal: there is no way to approach and disable a camera without being recorded by a different camera doing it.
If your front door camera is mounted alone with nothing covering it, a guest can walk up, cover it or pull it down, and your footage of that action is gone. If your back door camera can see your front door camera — even partially — then disabling the front camera is itself recorded from the back.
Map it out on paper before you mount anything. Draw your camera fields of view. Find the gaps. Add cameras until there are none. This takes an extra step before installation and it is worth every minute.
Your cameras should not be on the same WiFi network as your guests. This is the part most hosts skip, and it is a serious gap.
A guest who knows what they are doing can attempt to interfere with devices on the same network. More practically: guest devices putting load on your network can affect camera upload quality and reliability. And if you ever have a guest who is technically sophisticated and malicious, you do not want your cameras and your smart locks on the same network they are connected to.
The fix is straightforward. Set up three networks on your mesh router:
We run this on a TP-Link Deco mesh system. The guest network is completely isolated from the admin network at the router level. A guest cannot see or reach your cameras, lock, or thermostat regardless of what they try.
Your cameras and your smoke/CO detectors should be on the same monitoring platform if possible. We run Ring cameras alongside First Alert SMCO410 detectors, which integrate directly with Ring. When a smoke alarm triggers, Ring notifies us and our cameras immediately show us every angle of the property so we can assess what is happening before deciding whether to call the fire department.
When a guest burned a steak and triggered the kitchen detector, we were on a call with Ring while simultaneously watching live camera footage. We could see the guests were fine and that it was a cooking incident before Ring finished their escalation protocol. We canceled the fire department response before it was dispatched. That is what integrated monitoring looks like.
If your cameras and your detectors are on separate apps with no integration, you are managing two separate systems in an emergency. That is slower and more error-prone than it needs to be.
We are not going to name names or go into the full case details here. But we will tell you what happened, because it is the best argument for everything above.
Guests checked in and, within the first hour, began methodically attempting to disable cameras. They started with the most visible ones — the cameras over the main entry points. They got a few. Then they moved to the others.
What they did not know: every camera on the property had at least one other camera covering it. As they disabled each one, the camera watching it recorded the whole thing. By the time they had gone through several attempts, we had video documentation of the entire sequence — who did it, in what order, and when.
We had the footage before the stay was over. We shared it with Airbnb support before they tried to file any claim. The case was resolved in our favor. We were not reimbursed for everything, but we had documentation that no one could dispute.
The setup cost us more time and money upfront than a single camera at the front door. It paid for itself on that one stay.
Cameras are one layer. Smart locks, listing settings, house rules, and guest vetting are the others. Our complete guest screening guide covers the whole system.
Read: How to Dissuade Bad Guests from BookingThis post is part of STR Host Guide: Scout. Setup. Stay. Stream. Coming soon on Amazon.