A federal judge in California has dismissed the first two in a series of hundreds of lawsuits filed against hotel owners for allegedly failing to provide sufficient accessibility information on their online booking platforms.
The suits are among over 450 cases that have emerged from a single California firm. According to the plaintiffs, the hotels failed to comply with ADA Title III regulations—which oversee hotel reservation policies—by providing enough detailed accessibility information on their websites and third-party booking sites. They further allege that the hotels are required to provide specific data, such as the dimensions of space under accessible sinks and desks, rather than simply labeling elements of the room or property as “accessible.”
In the first case, heard in February, the plaintiff claimed that the hotel in question, a Marriott franchisee in Anaheim, did not provide enough details on Expedia regarding the property's accessibility features.
But the hotels named in the lawsuits disagree that the ADA regulations demand such specifications, and so far, their arguments have been gaining traction in court.
District Judge Cormac Carney, who heard the case against the Marriott franchisee, ruled that hotels cannot be held responsible for the information on Expedia. “Nothing in Plaintiff’s Complaint suggests that the alleged deficiencies on Expedia’s website was due to Defendant’s failure to make information available to Expedia," Carney said in his decision.
The court also found that the information available on both Marriott's reservation website and Expedia was indeed sufficient because the website "need not list its website, need not list its compliance or non-compliance with every ADAAG provision to satisfy 28 C.F.R. § 36.302(e)(ii), citing the DOJ Guidance.”
Carney's opinion was echoed again in a second similar case, which claimed that inadequate accessibility information was provided during a booking on Marriot.com.
Attorney Philip Stillman, who represents several independent hotel clients along with all of the Marriot franchisees in California, praised the federal judge’s recent decisions, saying they mark an overdue turning of the tide in dealing with serial litigants who routinely file such claims. Stillman, who has succeeded in getting four additional accessibility suits dismissed with prejudice in the past several weeks, said that the cases amount to nothing short of harassment and threaten to cause significant undue duress for the defendants.
“Some of these hotels have been sued hundreds of times,” Stillman said.
One attorney, Peter Strojnik, became a notorious participant in the serial suits after filing hundreds of complaints on his own behalf and taking in about $250,000 in settlements. Strojnik was disbarred in 2019 for vexatious litigation. “We put him out of business at least in California,” Stillman said.
Stillman also said that in some cases, the plaintiff’s firm files multiple accessibility claims targeting different realms of the hotel's operations.
"One will claim the parking lot is not compliant, another claims the website doesn't have full disclosure, and a third might say [the hotel] doesn't comply with reader software for the blind," said Stillman. Every hotel, then, can be simultaneously subjected to several different lawsuits by different plaintiffs.
According to Stillman, another plaintiff who is particularly active has filed a total of 843 cases, including six cases on one particular night just last week. "He's been suing multiple hotel and business entities on a daily basis,” Stillman said.
Lynn Mohrfeld, CEO of the California Hotel and Lodging Association, agrees that the lawsuits are frivolous and pose a significant threat to the hotel industry.
"This is a continuing issue, and this is a massive issue, especially in California," said Mohrfeld.
Mohrfeld says that the influx of lawsuits is the result of California's Unruh Act, which increases settlement amounts by about $4,000 for issues pertaining to failures of ADA compliance.
"Over the last decade or maybe even two decades, almost everybody in the California hotel industry has been litigated at least one time over the ADA issue," Mohrfeld said.
Stillman said that he has considered filing a counterclaim against the firm that continues to push out baseless serial accessibility lawsuits, but so far, he has not felt the need to do so because the cases are continuing to be dismissed.
"These cases are totally and completely without merit. The key is to provide a lot of these independent hotels with a means by which to defend themselves against these drive-by ADA lawsuits," Stillman said.