Suing an Airbnb Host After a Fall at a Property Abroad

Attorney Answer

The obstacle here is not whether the owner was negligent — it is which court, in which country, can hear the claim at all. A Georgia court almost certainly cannot.

Georgia's Long Arm Statute, OCGA § 9-10-91, lets a Georgia court reach someone who does not live here only in defined situations: transacting business in Georgia, committing a tortious act or omission in Georgia, causing a tortious injury in Georgia by an act outside it while regularly doing business or deriving substantial revenue here, or owning, using or possessing real property in Georgia. A homeowner in Costa Rica who listed a property on a booking platform has generally done none of those things. As the Supreme Court of Georgia put it, the statute "requires that an out-of-state defendant must do certain acts within the State of Georgia before he can be subjected to" the jurisdiction of its courts. Constitutional due process imposes the same limit independently: the defendant must have purposefully availed itself of Georgia, and Georgia courts have refused jurisdiction over foreign defendants whose product or service merely reached this state without being aimed at it.

That leaves three realistic routes, and they run on different clocks than a Georgia case would.

Report the injury through the platform immediately. Booking platforms operate their own host-liability and damage programs, and access to them normally depends on reporting through the platform promptly and on the terms you accepted when you booked. Those terms also govern any claim against the platform itself, including where and how such a claim must be brought — read the dispute-resolution section of the terms in your account rather than assuming a Georgia court is available.

A claim against the owner would ordinarily belong in Costa Rica, where the property and the owner are. That means Costa Rican law, Costa Rican procedure and Costa Rican filing deadlines, which can be considerably shorter than Georgia's. Do not assume you have anything like a two-year window; ask a Costa Rican attorney what the deadline is before you do anything else.

Insurance is often the fastest recovery. Check any travel policy, the travel protection attached to the card you paid with, and your own health plan's out-of-country coverage for the treatment you have already received.