Crowne Plaza Hotels is an upscale business hotel brand belonging to InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), with hundreds of franchises around the world. Unfortunately, neither recognizable branding nor luxury amenities can guarantee that a hotel is a safe place to stay.
Below, we’ll go over some famous examples of alleged negligence at Crowne Plaza Hotels, and common reasons you might need to sue IHG or one of its franchises. If at any point you would prefer to speak directly with a lawyer about your case, feel free to reach out by phone or chat.
Crowne Plaza Hotel Restaurants Have Been Associated with Multiple Deaths
The most famous premises liability lawsuit against a Crowne Plaza Hotel would of course be the one concerning the death of Kenneka Jenkins.
Kenneka Jenkins was a Chicago teenager who attended a party at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare Hotel in September of 2017. At around 3:00am, she apparently wandered into the hotel’s industrial freezer and became trapped there. Her friends called her mother within half an hour to say that they couldn’t find her, and her mother immediately called the hotel’s front desk. An employee promised to check the security cameras to help find her, but reportedly did not follow through. Jenkins was not found until police retraced her movements on the security footage 21 hours later. By that time, she had died of hypothermia.
Investigators believe that Jenkins was disoriented when she entered the freezer, due to a drug interaction between alcohol and topiramate, a prescription medication used to treat migraines and epilepsy.
Without admitting any wrongdoing, the hotel settled her wrongful death case for nearly $10 million.
This was not the first time a grieving family had sued a Crowne Plaza Hotel for reasons related to its restaurant management. In 2012, a North Carolina couple celebrating their wedding anniversary at the Crowne Plaza Tennis & Golf Resort ordered and consumed 24 alcoholic drinks between them. By the end of the night, the wife was so intoxicated that the staff delivered her to her room in a wheelchair, and the next morning, her husband found her dead on the floor.
Ultimately, the North Carolina Supreme Court voted 4-3 against allowing the husband to collect compensation from the hotel, but the incident is still worth noting, because even within that judgment, the court acknowledged that the hotel was negligent for continuing to serve a visibly intoxicated person. The rationale for overturning the lower courts’ rulings in favor of the husband was that the victim shared roughly equal negligence herself.
More recently, Crowne Plaza Hotel restaurants have also had two large-scale food poisoning incidents, one in Hong Kong in 2019, and one in New South Whales in 2022. Roughly fifty people fell ill, and at least seven required hospital care. Health officials identified the Australian outbreak as salmonella, and while there were thankfully no fatalities, several victims reported fearing for their lives during the worst of the symptoms.
Swimming Pools Accidents and CO Leaks Are a Threat at Every Hotel Price Point
Drowning and carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning are two of the most common causes of accidental death at hotels. In spite of this, most hotels still do not offer lifeguard coverage at their pools. Many even refuse to maintain working CO detectors in guest rooms. Guests often assume that upscale brands will have better safety standards than cheaper ones, but this isn’t reliably the case.
The Crowne Plaza brand hasn’t been associated with a confirmed CO poisoning in some time, but there have been some alarming incidents in the past.
Back in 1999, a painting sandblaster malfunctioned and filled the basement of a New York Crowne Plaza Hotel with the deadly gas. The whole building had to be evacuated, and three construction workers and an 11-year-old guest ended up in the hospital.
Then, in 2006, a retired couple began manifesting serious symptoms of CO poisoning while staying at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Liverpool, England. When other family members came to the hotel to help them, they developed symptoms as well. Eventually, emergency responders sent the couple to a nearby hospital. Somehow, the cause of their illness — a blockage in one of the hotel’s boilers — was not publicly confirmed until seven years later.
Crowne Plaza Hotels have also had a few serious pool accidents.
In 2012, a 16-year-old boy jumped off the diving board at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Henrico, Virginia, hit his head on the edge, and drowned. Casual swimmers often don’t know how to dive correctly or how dangerous it can be, which is exactly why most hotel pools have not had diving boards since the 1990s.
Four years later, two small children were playing in the pool of the Crowne Plaza Lord Beaverbrook Hotel in Frederickton, New Brunswick, when they began showing signs of distress. Their mother was supervising and immediately jumped in after them, but she herself did not know how to swim. Emergency crews had to rescue all three guests, and one required hospital care.
If you have also fallen victim to one of these typical hotel accidents, or any other kind, at a Crowne Plaza Hotel, it’s a good idea to speak with a lawyer about your options as soon as possible.
Crowne Plazas Trusted to House People in Crisis Have Allegedly Dropped the Ball, Repeatedly
It’s not uncommon for government and nonprofit organizations to make arrangements with private hotels to rent space for people who are in need of help. Crowne Plaza Hotels around the country and the world have entered into several of these agreements, and the results have been troubling.
For example, in 2020, the county of San Diego organized a program to shelter people who had been exposed to COVID, and lacked a safe place to quarantine, in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Mission Valley, California. Guests and workers at the hotel during that time reported a lack of access to baby food, unaddressed mental health episodes, harassment and physical abuse from security guards, and a case of a dead body allegedly going unnoticed for five days.
The next year, an English high court judge ordered that an asylum seeker be moved out of the Crowne Plaza Hotel at Heathrow Airport and into more suitable accommodations. His lawyer, who also represents other people housed in that hotel, described the place as “prison-like” and “dehumanizing.”
As recently as February of 2024, another asylum seeker being housed at a Crowne Plaza Hotel in Queens, New York told reporters that many of the women sheltered there were being forced into prostitution, sometimes by their own husbands, sometimes by outside traffickers preying on their lack of options. The co-owner of a nearby church-based resource center for refugees corroborated the woman’s story, saying that she often hears of women being lured from the Crowne Plaza with promises of work and then sexually assaulted.
When government and nonprofit programs fall short of their goals, the blame usually falls on the programs themselves. It’s important to remember, however, that private hotels also share responsibility for their guests’ safety, whether they arrive through a public program, or simply by making a reservation.
Hotels Have a Duty to Protect Guests from Violence and Exploitation, as Well as Accidents
When most people think about premises liability, they think about accidents. If someone hurt you on purpose while you were staying at a Crowne Plaza Hotel, suing the hotel might not be your first instinct.
As natural as it is to focus your desire for justice on the individual criminal who hurt you, the problem with this is that criminal law focuses solely on punishing and deterring crime, not on compensating victims. Compensation is the job of civil lawsuits, and unless your individual attacker or exploiter is very wealthy, suing them probably won’t yield worthwhile results. In order to cover your losses, you’ll need to make a claim against an entity that’s large enough to afford a fair settlement, like a hospitality company.
Suing a Crowne Plaza Hotel when you’ve been the victim of a crime there is not an arbitrary or greedy act. A hotel’s approach to security and its relationship with crime can massively impact how likely a guest is to become a victim of violence.
Sometimes, hotels make themselves deliberately welcoming to criminals, in order to profit off of criminal enterprises, typically sex trafficking. Supporting or, at best, ignoring sex traffickers was an extremely common practice throughout the U.S hospitality industry until around 2019, when a flood of lawsuits set a precedent for holding hotels accountable. At least one Crowne Plaza Hotel was named among the dozens of defendants during that first handful of suits.
Before sex trafficking litigation was common, police also discovered signs of sex trafficking at Crowne Plaza Hotels firsthand. Back in 2014, at a Crowne Plaza in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, an undercover officer approached a woman who had been featured in a prostitution ad on Backpage. She pointed out her trafficker and told the officer that he had been holding her and two other women captive in another hotel nearby.
Hotel owners may also skimp on security for cost-cutting or aesthetic reasons. This can put guests in harm’s way, especially in areas with high rates of gun violence.
Within roughly the past five years, there have been at least seven violent incidents involving guns at Crowne Plaza Hotels in the U.S and Canada. At least three of these took place in parking lots and entryways, and two were indoor altercations between guests. In one case in Tennessee, an intoxicated guest became belligerent when a staff member asked him to leave, and reached into his backpack for a gun. In the apparent absence of security personnel, a group of guests had to pile on top of him to prevent a shooting.
If you have been attacked or criminally exploited at a Crowne Plaza Hotel, talk the details over with a lawyer to determine whether the hotel may have owed you better protection than you received.
What to Do If You’ve Been Harmed at a Crowne Plaza Hotel
In the aftermath of an accident or attack, it might feel like you suddenly have a million tasks that all need to be handled at once. It can help to sort those tasks into a few essential categories, and approach them one by one:
- Safety. This is your first priority. If you’re in immediate danger of further harm, get yourself to safety before worrying about anything else.
- Medical care. The sooner you start treatment for your injuries, the lower your risk of complications, and the more accurate your medical records will be.
- Evidence. In addition to establishing accurate medical records, you might have time-sensitive opportunities to gather other types of evidence, such as photos of the scene. Collect and preserve everything you believe may be relevant, as long as you can do so without compromising your safety or health.
- Representation. The sooner you start working with a qualified lawyer, the better your chances of collecting fair compensation. Don’t enter into detailed correspondence with Crowne Plaza until you’ve completed this step.
The Stoddard Firm is passionate about holding large companies accountable when they put profits ahead of human lives and safety. We’re even more passionate about making sure our clients can access the resources they need to put their lives back together as completely as possible. We’re experts in franchise and innkeeper laws, personal injury, wrongful death, premises liability, negligent security, and human trafficking law.
We’ll work with you to reconstruct exactly what happened to you, calculate the full value of your losses, and build the best strategy to get you the compensation you deserve.
To get started talking with an Atlanta-based hotel lawyer today, reach out through our online chat function or at 678-RESULTS for a free consultation.
Attorney Matt Stoddard
Matt Stoddard is a professional, hardworking, ethical advocate. He routinely faces some of the nation’s largest companies and some of the world’s largest insurers – opponents who have virtually unlimited resources. In these circumstances, Mr. Stoddard is comfortable. Mr. Stoddard provides his strongest efforts to his clients, and he devotes the firm’s significant financial resources to presenting the strongest case possible on their behalf. Matt understands that his clients must put their trust in him. That trust creates an obligation for Matt to work tirelessly on their behalf, and Matt Stoddard does not take that obligation lightly. [ Attorney Bio ]
