Was the neighbor who had control of the unit as a tenant on the lease home when the room was rented out? I don't think so. The article opens with these paragraphs:

"First came the noisy upstairs neighbors who said they were just "renting the place for a couple of nights" but refused to tone it down. Then came the people who would try to open the front door of the Castro/Duboce Triangle apartment where Barnaby Thieme and Rebecca Reagan live, saying they thought it led to the lobby.

"The couple looked online and discovered what was behind the disruptions - a unit in their building was being rented out through Airbnb, the marketplace for short-term housing in private residences."

I read that as saying that the couple who were disturbed by Airbnb visitors DID talk to those visitors, only to find out that they weren't actual tenants of the building. The person putting the unit up for short-term stays on Airbnb doesn't seem to have been available.

AFTER EDIT: A top-level comment that came in since I posted this makes an interesting point:

I admire the optimism that youth brings, allowing someone to look at a problem with a fresh perspective but all too often, the rules, laws and regulations in place that make the old way of doing business so boring and hard are actually in place for a very good reason.

This is usually how the law (and business custom) develops, by encountering actual human behavior. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." The Common Law (1881), p. 1.

They need to talk to the person the visitors are renting from. Is that doesn't work, they can go one level higher up.