BS. Perhaps the vast majority of publicity can be made positive for you, but if you screw up in your handling, you can get eaten alive.

AirBnB had a chance to make this publicity tolerable. Instead, they worried about "precedent" and "cost" and, in a fit of immaturity, tried to sweep it under the rug. Every one of those actions have magnified the severity of this crisis.

Now, instead of them being in the drivers seat of the story with some control of the fire, they are subject to whatever the winds want to do with it. In both cases, stuff gets burned, but it's usually not houses, businesses, and people in a controlled burn.