Not defending Airbnb's behaviour, but this sort of thing happens outside of Airbnb too. I had some tenants (sons of a well known rock star) cause around £10K worth of damage to my flat in Shoreditch (plus around £5K in lost rent given the amount of time it took to repair) a few years back. In that case the letting agency I used was no help because they said it was a private matter between myself and the tenants, the insurance was no good because they said that amount of damage could not be accidental and they didn't cover malicious damage, and the legal system was no help because it favours tenants. In fact I might even have been better off with Airbnb.
Good point. If you think about it, if everyone was responsible and stuff, these kinds of incidents could be avoided and the system would work so much better. I mean, I know that financially the host might be compensated but personally, the stress of having my home torn apart like that by strangers would be too much for me.
Point taken. Although the original point is that it might happen more than you might think with traditional letting agencies, if you aggregated all of the individual cases over all of the 10s of 1000s of letting agencies in the country. And it might not make the news as much if it happens with traditional letting agencies, given the media tends to like stories which paint new things/technology in a bad light.
How did you resolve it? Did you just eat the loss?
In the US, the best recourse would probably be to sue or file a police report for destruction of property. Neither of those are great options, but they might end up being arrested depending on the municipality.
There is a Small Claims Court in England, with a maximum claim of £10K. I got as far as issuing a Letter Before Action to the tenant's London-based guarantor (the tenant himself hadn't left a forwarding address, and his father is based in the Republic of Ireland where the Small Claims Court has a EUR2K limit), but ended up settling out of court and eating most of the loss.
