Marriott gives away guest’s stuff, fights compensation in court
viewfromthewing.com
viewfromthewing.com
This is one of my legal bug-bears. It really needs to be fixed. To use an example in my jurisdiction, theft becomes the equivalent of a felony when the value of the item stolen exceeds $5000. This law dates to the 1940s. That's about $65,000 today. It was not the intent of the legislature that stealing a cheap car carry up to 10 years in prison. At this rate it will soon be a felony to pinch a particularly nice steak.
The problem applies to every fixed dollar value in legislation. Fines are another big one. I'm pretty sure city council intended litterers to lose more than about one hour of average wages for littering in public.
What a garbage feature, I'd like word with the devs.
EDIT: Corrected the amount that the court ruled Marriott owed him.
It actually ruled $1,000 in damages, plus interest and court costs.
If it wasn't due to Marriott ’s negligence, there would be no liability at all. Civil Code § 1859 explicitly limits liability of an “innkeeper, hotelkeeper, operator of a licensed hospital, rest home or sanitarium, furnished apartment house keeper, furnished bungalow court keeper, boardinghouse or lodginghouse keeper” for personal property losses to $1,000 in aggregate, and $500 “for each trunk and it's contents”, $250 each for “each valise or traveling bag and its contents”, “each box, bundle or package and its contents”, and “all other personal property of any kind” in the absence of advance written consent for greater liability.
The law is certainly outdated, but it's pretty cut and dried, so it's hard to see how a court could reasonably have ruled otherwise. (Actually, the court was clearly pissed off about the law, and about Marriot not just fully compensating the customer, which is why the judge calculated the interest not on the legally recoverable damages, but the full value of the possessions.)
Fixed, thanks.
> The law is certainly outdated, but it's pretty cut and dried, so it's hard to see how a court could reasonably have ruled otherwise.
Agreed. I don't fault the court at all here. I fault Marriott for exploiting a loophole rather than doing the right thing, and I fault the California legislature for the loophole's existence.
Why not, within the otherwise generally-applicable rules of tort liability? Capping liability for failures to meet the expected duty of care encourages failure to meet the expected duty of care.
Why should a negligent hotelier be any less liable for the harms they cause through their negligence than any other negligent actor?
(Certainly, if there is a cause for a limit, it shouldn’t be less than the cost of decent new valise for each valise and its contents, and capped at 4 times that per guest; were I to suggest a limit, I’d probably do it per room, and have it be something like 10 times the maximum daily rate from the posted room rates required by Civil Code Section 1863; I’d probably also reverse the consent requirement, so that presumptively there would be unlimited liability, but the guest could consent in writing to the reduced liability. Since the hotelier is a merchant in a particular line of businesss, it is much fairer to assume that they have notice of the special legal conditions applicable to liability in that line than the guest, so the default conditions should favor the guest, with the written notice and affirmative consent required to alter it.)
That’s not meaningfully different from what we have now. With no specified minimum, the contract for every hotel will simply specify that the hotel has _no_ liability at all. If you specify a minimum, then every contract will specify that they have the minimum liability. Unless the hotel can make the amount of liability that they accept legible to potential customers (ie, it becomes something that they brag about in their advertising and that customers shop around for), then there is no financial incentive to do more than the minimum. Which is exactly the situation we are already in.
One alternative would be to leave the hotel’s liability uncapped but then allow them to decline to rent rooms to guests with expensive belongings, or require their guests to have separate insurance, or whatever. Realistically the only difference between this and our current situation is that we don’t have to answer so many impertinent questions during check–in; the hotel just assumes that you have either insured your belongings or kept them to a minimum.
I both provided a proposed limit, and proposed reversing the consent so instead of “statutory limit is default, but hotel can consent in writing to a higher limit” the rule is “normal unlimited liability is the default, guest can consent in writing to a liability limit not less than 10 times the legal room rate”.