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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

Do hotels have a regulation that says they're not allowed to ban customers?

Or are you just taking the opportunity to get on your soapbox to complain about AirBnB?

Yes, if you're interested you can look up hospitality law or innkeeper law. Airbnb and others attempt to replicate existing services while sidestepping the regulations in place, which of course makes them cheaper / faster because they don't have to deal with the regulatory burden..

I tried looking up both of these terms, and I didn't find anything about not being allowed to arbitrarily ban an individual from your hotel.

I was curious, so I did some searching regarding hospitality law. These results are generalized phrasing of the law, so you'd have to search further to get into specifics.

IRT the OP, it seemed as if they wanted him to leave the premises early. Forcefully removing a guest would (I assume) fall under eviction. This is legal[0] in certain circumstances. From [0]:

> Hotels may generally evict a guest and keep the room rental payment, despite the eviction, for the following reasons:

> disorderly conduct

> ...

The host's review attempts to call the guest disorderly. If we assume that the host's review was 100% accurate, I don't think that could be called disorderly. A hassle to the host? Certainly. Disorderly? Doubtful. Again - the host made an error with the time, and the host wanted the guest to leave early. It would seem that the guest would still have contractual rights to the premises for the full time.

[0]: https://travel.uslegal.com/hotel-liability/right-to-evict-pe...

The question was about banning someone from making a reservation, not about removing a guest.

Just the fact that there is legislation or government regulation spelling out conditions under which an eviction can occur means that judicial review is possible and we're not in a loony EULA-fueled scenario where people can be banned with no due process available. So they _can_ do whatever they want, but there's a predictable downside that will tend to get corporate policies aligned to a more reasonable standard. (IANAL.)

Eviction has to do with tenants, not hotel guests. Hotels don't need any judicial review to ask someone to leave. However, the police may decide not to use force in which case the hotel would have to go the judicial route, but usually not the case.

In order to avoid having to deal with eviction regulations, hotels or motels in many states actually require hotel guests to leave the hotel every 29 nights or however long the regulations come into effect that bring in eviction procedures.

My more general point holds. I did not mean that hotels have to involve a judge to boot you. I meant that because they are regulated and not in a semi-private legal gray area, there are more legal options available for someone than OP has with Airbnb, where he's bound by their special agreements that give Airbnb vast power.

Hotels can do the same thing by inserting that at the bottom of the registration form people sign at check in or in the app. They already might have. I'm just not aware of any laws that would concern a hotel guests stay other than having proper fire safety and ADA compliance.

The question was very specifically about whether a hotel can refuse to rent you a room. It was not a general question about how they can treat you once you're staying there.

IANAL, but besides the protected classes that have been linked below, the United States regulates the hospitality industry on a federal, state, and local level. For the guest, that means a legal recourse, and not a medium blogpost.

We can quibble about the word “banning”, but the fact remains that, for hotels, there is a body of laws “against [guest] injury, whether accidental or intentional“. For the tech giant that pretends it’s not even in the same industry, there’s just a patchwork of guidelines.

I'm still haven't seen anyone claim that you'd have legal recourse if the Hilton refused to rent you a room, unless it was due to protected class status. Wouldn't a person in that analogous situation be stuck with a blog post too?

I'm interested to know what these federal regulations are for hotels. And state and local ones I'm familiar with only deal with life safety measures and making sure hotels are keeping accurate records of the people staying in the hotel.

>someone gives a reasonable 2 cents

>another person screeches at him or her for having an opinion

>new commenter calmly rebuts the miscreant.

This is why I like HN.

Just like other businesses, the hotel owner can refuse a customer to rent a room.

One thing is different is there are multiple hotels, so you can go to a different hotel. But there is only one AirBnB.

As a hotel owner, I would love to get a system like AirBnB. Only rent rooms to those who give you good reviews and the hotel can write reviews about guest behavior. So that we can refuse service to those who are a pain in the butt.

I know due to Hampton's service guarantee, they keep a list of people who abuse it and are banned. But hotel owners should be forcing the franchise companies to setup a central database to track repeat scammers. Only reason they haven't yet is that the liability is felt by the owners, and the brands get to keep collecting their revenue regardless.

Who determines who is a scammer? Why wouldn't they add someone who left a scathing yelp review to such a list?

Obviously at some point, someone has to make a judgment call. But the system is probably setup so that a hotel guest that keeps making claims out of the ordinary frequency will be flagged for review or maybe even automatically banned. If someone walks into a room at 10 different hotels and is claiming bed bugs at each one and no one else is experiencing them at those hotels, then I'd be willing to bet they're trying to score free hotel nights.

Yelp reviews probably matter for local restaurants and small businesses, but probably not much for national brands which have their own inspections and quality assurance departments. I don't check the yelp review of Enterprise or Residence Inn, but I might for restaurant I've never heard of.

I'm sure there are pathological liars that scam corporations for petty gains, but I figure they must be dwarfed financially by insurance scammers that do intentional slip-and-fall accidents or have their car "stolen" from the parking lot or other ways to reap big insurance setrlements.

Not in my experience. You still have to win a case or have compelling evidence to force a settlement for slip and fall stuff, plus insurance is involved in that. Cars being stolen isn't a merchants problem unless they're selling secure storage for your car, which a parking lot isn't.

What does come up in hotels is people trying to get sneak extra people in, pets, claiming bugs, making too much noise and disturbing other guests, etc.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000a

The linked law doesn’t apply to this situation. The banned person apparently wasn’t banned due to being a member of a protected class.

Fair point. I think the idea is that there is a due process, and legal recourse if your rights were infringed. The existence of these laws would make public accommodations at least think twice before denying service.

AirBnB is apparently avoiding these laws by putting forced arbitration into its terms of service.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanlebeau/2016/11/02/racial-...

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