[pseudonym]

I honestly think that there's three proper responses:

1. Work on your system to help prevent something like this doesn't happen again.

2. Add a couple dollars of "insurance" to the cost. If the PR statement is accurate and there's been "2 million nights stayed" before an incident like this, having a couple bucks per renter would have more than covered the cost of this theoretically isolated incident.

3, which is far more important, figure out a way to reimburse her. This is already far overdue, and I realize there's a couple lawyers that'll say "But it opens the door for a fault-based civil suit", but that's an issue for the lawyers. It seems like human decency here, and it would be a transparent PR tactic to have waited 5 weeks to do it, but it really does seem like it's something they'll have to do to recover from this, especially if she keeps blogging about it.

[eric-hu]

I would add onto 3--however the reimbursement is done, make sure she doesn't publish the actual numbers. One of the AirBnB guys blogged about this and included the maximum on his insurance policy for his east coast cabin. The first comment was "if you publish this number, everyone and anyone who sues will sue for this amount". Likewise with any future settlements.