Wow Simon - my husband and I have just gone through the exact same thing!! In our case, the refrigerator was not working at all the day we arrived and it took the host 5 days to send a technician out who told us to turn off the fridge for 24 hours cause it needed to de-ice. So all our food was spoiled. We were so nice to this woman and wrote her a beautiful review anyway not mentioning the fridge. And in her review - it was so dreadful, she said we broker her refrigerator and left the place in a filthy mess; we cleaned it perfectly mopping the floor the day before we left and the day we left. And she said we had doggy pee pads all over - utter lie - we put them in the rubbish bin in a sealed bag outside in the courtyard for her cleaners to remove when they arrived. We never in years had anyone totally lie about us and we realised she was so afraid we would mention how she didn't bother to send a technician out that she thought she better 'beat us to the punch'. And we had originally left a beautiful review for her.
There is only one thing you can do!! You can remove your beautiful nice review you left for your host. I don't know if there is a time limit to do it - so do it right away. And of course, leave a great reply to her horrible lies but the trouble is although that will show under your profile - it won't show on hers which is an absolute shame. You can only edit a review for a host until they have left a review for you - and then it's locked in. So definitely contact Air BNB and ask them to remove your review for her.
I don't know if there is anything that she has done that has cost you $$ but if there is -you can do a claim through Air BNB and when she refuses to pay for it - they will step in on your behalf. With us - it cost us about $250 USD in lost groceries and needing to get takeaways because we had no fridge - but the trouble is she had asked us for cleaning money (she provided a photo of one tablespoon of coffee grinds that spilled on one shelf of her fridge which I was about to clean when our taxi driver arrived to pick us up. I contested the cleaning charge and because I did that - when I put in my own case for our own lost funds Air BNB told me that the only way I could get that was if the host approved it and that Air BNB could no longer step in on our behalf because they had stepped in for us about the cleaning charge. Something like that was the reason.
Anyway, good luck - you have our total sympathy! In our case we have had about 8 Air BNB's reject us after they read her lying review so the impact is very big which is not good cause we are travelling in a foreign country with our little dogs and it makes life much harder. So wrong that Air BNB has allowed this to happen - as they could plainly see in all my conversations with Laura - that her fridge was not working on day one. Oh, also, she changed her name to 'Brenda' now and her profile picture to a different person. Surely that is some kind of fraud?! Our booking only ended 3 weeks ago, how can you change your photo and name on Air BNB - actually I will send them a message about that.
If your host advertises on Facebook - I would also go after her there to warn innocent people of her insanity. Let us know how you go!
