This is horrifying. I know we feel like there's nothing we can do and this type of thing is old news, or maybe a risk no matter where you are... but I can't do business with a company that reacts this way.
AirBnB is offering victims sometimes millions of dollars to settle claims, but they cannot force the victims to do anything. It turns out that as individual agents with free agency, the victims sometimes prefer to have millions of dollars.
I don't know about their morality, but their ethics appear to built upon Not Invented Here syndrome, where they don't allow themselves to learn from the (long) history of hotel and motels.
That said, it's rarely millions. Total settlements = $50M. They have 100 full-time safety agents. This means each agent handles an average of $500k per year. If we assume each agent handles 4 incidents per day, times 200 days, that's 800 incidents, or under $1k per incident.
The scale of the problem, per the article, is striking.
My assumption is that minor incidents would take 5-15 minutes (e.g. in your case of the toilet overflowing, perhaps a refund). If this dominated, you'd be looking at 30+ cases per day per agent.
More serious incidents would probably take a few days.
I kinda took a geometric mean, but I have no idea the threshold for incidents escalating to this team.
I will disagree with this no matter who does it.
Even feeling as strongly as I do about this, I would personally have a hard time turning down millions of dollars — the power imbalance is so large here that it's the illusion of a choice.