This is a terrible incident, and poor initial handling, but it sounds like a reasonable policy change on the part of the company. I'm actually suprised though

This is a terrible incident, and poor initial handling, but it sounds like a reasonable policy change on the part of the company. I'm actually suprised though that host safety/security hasn't been a bigger issue. Last weekend my wife & I stayed at an apartment ("whole place") in a large US city. The host, a girl in her early 20s, probably quite new to the city, and who we didn't meet, left us her apartment keys (all of them): there was no combination lock on the door, i.e. nothing preventing somebody from duplicating the keys and having permanent access to the apartment. On top of that, all of her stuff was in the apartment - clothes, paperwork, jewelry - and as far as we could see (we didn't snoop beyond looking for an iron) she didn't have a lockbox there. Obviously she's naive, but she's not alone; I've heard several similar stories. I'm not sure what I'd have airbnb do to improve the situation; at minimum, though, requiring the use of combination door locks with guest-specific combinations would seem like a good policy, although obviously they'd lost a lot of hosts by doing so.