Embassy Suites is a Hilton brand with hundreds of locations around the U.S, each one owned and managed by a franchisee. With its large suites and complimentary made-to-order breakfasts, Embassy Suites presents itself as a comfortable option for business travelers and family vacations. It’s easy to feel safe in such an environment, but unfortunately, that feeling isn’t always justified.
Below, we’ll go over common reasons you might need to sue an Embassy Suites. If at any point you would prefer to speak directly with a lawyer, feel free to reach out by phone or chat.
All businesses with physical premises are responsible for making sure those premises are reasonably safe for their guests. Even small hotels with simple construction should always be on the lookout for hazards that could foreseeably injure someone, such as uneven walking surfaces, or overheated tap water.
The bigger and more complex a property is, the more potential hazards the owner needs to watch for. A large hotel like an Embassy Suites requires consistent maintenance to keep all of its features in safe working order. The architects and construction companies that design, build, and update these hotels must also anticipate the way they will be used, and avoid creating inherent safety flaws.
Unfortunately, quite a few Embassy Suites guests have suffered serious, preventable accidents while making their way around the premises of these hotels.
In 2015, a 3-year-old girl fell from a fifth-story walkway into the courtyard of the Embassy Suites in Anaheim, California. Police ruled her death an accident. Her family was staying in multiple suites of the hotel as part of a Disneyland vacation. Relatives reported that the girl had tried to sneak out of her room before, to look for other relatives staying on the ground floor. They believe she did the same again, leaned out between the railings of the walkway to look down into the courtyard, and fell through.
In 2018, a teenage girl staying at the Embassy Suites in Indianapolis, Indiana had her foot dragged into the works of the hotel’s escalator. A bystander reported that he had to run down the opposite side of the escalator to press the emergency stop button, because he couldn’t find one on the upper landing where the accident happened.
That same year, a woman staying at the Embassy Suites near the Denton Convention Center in Texas reported that one of the hotel’s elevator doors had closed forcefully on her, causing a fall and a broken femur.
Five years later, another woman reported almost exactly the same kind of elevator accident at the Embassy Suites in Charleston, West Virginia. According to her, the elevator was behaving oddly while she was trying to exit, and then closed on her foot, crushing it. She is currently in the process of suing.
In each of these cases, guests had a right to expect safer conditions than what they were exposed to. It’s not too much to ask for elevators and escalators to have working safety mechanisms, or for an elevated walkway in a family hotel to have sidings without child-sized gaps.
Swimming facilities are consistently some of the most dangerous areas of hotels, especially for children. Short of eliminating these popular amenities, the most effective thing hotels can do to prevent serious accidents is invest in full-time lifeguard coverage. Even among unguarded hotel pools, however, accident rates vary widely from one location to another, due to a range of smaller factors.
Clear water, correct chemical balance, properly working pumps, clear walking surfaces, accurate safety signage, and self-closing childproof access gates are all important components of a safe swimming pool.
At least six children have drowned over the past six years in Embassy Suites pools, four of them fatally.
Two of those deaths took place at a single location in Birmingham, Alabama, within a year and a half of each other. In both cases, the victim was attending a pool party and drowned without anyone in the crowded pool area noticing signs of distress.
The family of one of those children called for a search of the Birmingham hotel when they noticed he was missing, after the rest of the party had vacated the pool. Apparently, even with the pool empty of swimmers, the adults standing at the edge were not able to see the child’s body under the water.
Drownings are not the only hazard pools can pose, either. Poor maintenance of pool facilities can endanger even guests who never use them.
Early this year, a container full of pool chemicals exploded in an Embassy Suites in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Six people were injured, three of them badly enough to require hospital care. Firefighters conducting the evacuation and hazmat cleanup noted that the chlorine fumes could have done far more damage if the pool area were less isolated from the rest of the building.
Back in 2012, an Embassy Suites in Burlingame, California also had to evacuate in response to another poisonous gas spreading from its pool area: carbon monoxide.
Unlike chlorine gas, carbon monoxide has no smell or caustic properties to warn victims of a problem. In that incident, a guest staying in the room directly above the pool’s malfunctioning boiler failed to report to work. When his coworkers reported him missing, the hotel staff found him in the room, unresponsive and covered in vomit. Only when an ER doctor diagnosed him with carbon monoxide poisoning did the other guests learn that their lives were in danger.
The victim survived with severe brain damage and later sued the hotel. According to his lawyer, the pool boiler had been installed without a permit and was not properly inspected or maintained.
Maintaining a safe hotel means anticipating all foreseeable threats to guests, and taking all reasonable precautions to guard against those threats. This includes not only accidents, but the threat of violence.
When a hotel or its surrounding area has an established history of violent crime, the hotel’s owner has a duty to provide proportionate security. Appropriate measures might include visible surveillance cameras, requiring a photo ID for check-in, limiting access for visitors not registered as guests, and a security guard presence.
For the Embassy Suites brand as a whole, and especially for certain locations, gun violence has been far from a non-issue recently.
Within the last four years alone:
As insurmountable a problem as gun violence might seem, security measures at hotels really do make a statistical difference. If you have been injured or lost a loved one due to violent crime at an Embassy Suites, don’t ignore the hotel’s responsibility in your pursuit of justice.
Unfortunately, the best security in the world won’t make a hotel any safer, unless management actually treats the safety of vulnerable guests as a priority, and trains staff accordingly.
The behavior of the staff at Embassy Suites has not always reflected these values.
In April of 2014, a woman on a business trip in Des Moines, Iowa woke to find an intruder in her Embassy Suites room. He proceeded to rape and batter her over the course of several hours. The woman had engaged all of the room’s provided door locks before bed, but the man reportedly persuaded the staff not only to give him a key, but to physically disable the safety latch for him. At no point was he asked for any proof that he was welcome in the room, or even registered as a guest. The woman sued and ultimately accepted an undisclosed settlement.
The most charitable (to Embassy Suites) interpretation of this incident would be that the staff lacked training in security procedures and had no knowledge of the man’s predatory intent.
There is another possibility, however.
Historically, it has been common practice for hotels to allow sex traffickers to operate on their premises, ignoring or even assisting with their crimes in exchange for repeat business or bribes. At a hotel where sex trafficking is a regular occurrence, the staff might consider it business as usual to help a man access a woman’s room without her consent.
In the U.S, it was almost unheard of for hotels to be held accountable for their participation in sex trafficking until around 2019. Nowadays, there’s strong precedent for survivors to sue complicit hotels, sometimes even chains, and win.
At least two of the women who have come forward since 2019 have named Embassy Suites among the businesses that hosted their exploitation. One reported being trafficked out of the Buffalo, New York location for three months in 2016. Another described a nearly decade-long ordeal, beginning with her being kidnapped from a Sacramento gas station during college. The long list of hotels where she says her trafficker kept and sold her includes an Embassy Suites in Alexandria, Virginia.
While the recent rise in sex trafficking lawsuits against hotels has helped survivors claim compensation and raise awareness, it hasn’t made the problem disappear.
As recently as April of 2022, a man was arrested and charged with 30 felony counts related to raping a 14-year-old girl, using her to make commercial porn, and forcing her to assist with his fentanyl dealing. He allegedly moved the girl through several California hotels over the course of these activities, including an Embassy Suites in Indio.
If you have also been used for commercial sexual activity while underage, or under any form of coercion at an Embassy Suites, you have the right to sue for compensation, and may even be able to do so anonymously.
As soon as you’ve taken care of your most immediate needs, such as escaping from further danger and seeking medical care, it’s in your best interests to find qualified legal counsel as soon as possible.
The sooner your lawyer can begin building your case, the more evidence will still be available. Having representation also allows you to avoid interacting with the hotel directly, which reduces both the stress on you and the odds that you might be tricked into saying something to damage your case.
The Stoddard Firm has extensive experience in civil cases of personal injury, wrongful death, premises liability, negligent security, and human trafficking, and we’re experts on the unique laws governing the hospitality industry.
We’re deeply passionate about getting the best possible outcome for each one of our clients, whether that means pursuing a giant like Hilton, focusing on a regional franchise holder, or exploring less obvious negligent parties.
To speak with a hotel lawyer in the Atlanta area, reach out through our online chat function or at 678-RESULTS for a free consultation.
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 ]
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