A lawsuit over online descriptions of hotel accessibility features that is before the U.S. Supreme Court may not end up the way hotel owners expect or hope, according to a hospitality attorney.
In a podcast interview with Hotel News Now, Dana Kravetz, managing partner at law firm Michelman & Robinson, said there’s a real possibility that while the court’s decision won’t hurt hoteliers, it’s not necessarily going to deliver them hoped-for relief either.
Acheson Hotels v. Laufer is a lawsuit brought by a plaintiff with a history of suing hotels that do not identify or describe on their websites the accessibility features of their hotels and guestrooms as required by law. The law is designed to prevent travelers with disabilities from booking a room and only learning upon arrival that it’s missing the necessary accessibility features.
Hotels have been targets of lawsuits over the lack of accessibility features required by the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as the law about online descriptions of those features, Kravetz said.
Many hotel owners feel suits brought against their properties are shakedowns when the plaintiffs are primarily motivated by a monetary award, rather than actions that would address the problems in the complaint, but even those keep property owners honest when there are actual compliance issues to fix, he said.
“These statutes do give rise to at times baseless claims,” Kravetz said. “At the same time, the statutes exist because ... it puts the feet to the fire to comply.”
The issue in this case is whether the plaintiff had standing to sue in the first place given the lack of intent to actually stay at the hotel by acting as what’s known as a “tester,” but a ruling on this might not be the solution hotel owners want exactly.
“The reality of the case is that there's a couple different ways that the Supreme Court could go, and I'm not sure it's going to give anyone the satisfaction that they necessarily wanted when they first saw the case having been filed,” he said.
To hear more from the interview, listen to the podcast above.