Hyatt Hotels & Resorts is a hospitality franchising company owned by the Pritzker family and based in Chicago. Hyatt locations exist all over the world and range from business hotels to luxury resorts. Yet for all their opulent amenities, Hyatt locations still sometimes overlook the basics of health and safety.
Below, we’ll go over some reasons why you might need to sue a Hyatt hotel. If at any time you’d prefer to speak directly with a lawyer, feel free to reach out by phone or chat.
On July 17th, 1981, approximately 2,000 people gathered in the atrium of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri for an elegant “Tea Dance” event. The atrium had several suspended walkways crossing through it, where some guests gathered to watch the dancing below. Partway through the evening, a fourth-floor walkway collapsed and struck the second-floor walkway directly below it. The second walkway also gave way, and both layers of wreckage landed on the packed ground floor.
The collapse also severed water pipes, which flooded the floor, while the victims were pinned there under the remains of the walkways.
All told, 114 people died in the accident and approximately 200 more were injured, making it the single deadliest structure collapse in U.S history until the fall of the World Trade Center. Excluding deliberate acts of destruction, it remains the deadliest to this day.
The National Bureau of Standards found that, in addition to being overcrowded on the night of the dance, the walkways had a flaw, introduced in a last-minute design change, which gave them only 60% of the loadbearing capacity required under the Kansas City building code.
Like so many disasters of this magnitude, the Tea Dance collapse prompted nationwide changes to safety standards, as well as disaster response procedures. All new building designs now require inspection by a third-party engineer, specifically because of what happened in the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City.
Of course, it shouldn’t take a sudden, massive loss of life to improve safety for the future. Every business has a duty to anticipate the ways that its products, services, and premises might pose a threat to human health and safety, and take all reasonable steps to stop accidents before they happen.
Few collapses compare with the Tea Dance incident, but other Hyatt hotels have had smaller-scale accidents related to unsound structures. Just within the past month, a temporary structure in the pool area of the Hyatt Regency Delhi in New Delhi, India collapsed on top of a husband and wife, injuring them both badly enough to require hospital care.
Other serious Hyatt accidents have involved people falling, rather than debris falling on top of them. Back in 2021, a Georgia woman staying in the Hyatt Paris reportedly entered her room’s bathroom to discover a swarm of insects, both living and dead. In reacting to the infestation, the woman slipped and broke her ankle.
A month later, a 1-year-old boy fell to his death from a ninth story window at the Hyatt Ziva Puerto Vallarta, in Jalisco, Mexico. According to the family, the window was not only at floor level, but missing its glass pane, leaving a completely open gap at crawling height.
At least two couples have also fallen ill after allegedly breathing poisonous levels of natural gas or carbon monoxide (CO) at Hyatt hotels. The most recent case was in June of 2023, at the now-closed Rancho Pescadero in Baja California Sur, Mexico. An American couple staying at the hotel sought medical care for what they thought was food poisoning, then returned to their room and were found dead the next day.
The hotel staff staged a protest shortly afterward, saying that management had repeatedly ignored their reports of gas leaks and disabled the CO detectors to keep them quiet. One employee stated that a housekeeper had become sick from cleaning the deceased couple’s room a matter of days earlier.
The other publicized incident took place in 2018, at the Hyatt Place Boulder in Colorado. A couple noticed that they were suffering from persistent lightheadedness while in the hotel and bought a CO detector, which they say went off as soon as they activated it in their room. The hotel staff reportedly ignored the couple’s discovery, but an ER doctor who had treated their symptoms called the fire department. Responding firefighters detected potentially deadly levels of CO in several of the hotel’s guest rooms and the boiler room.
In the subsequent lawsuit, Hyatt tried to avoid disclosing the names of other guests present at the Boulder location on that day, arguing that making more people aware of their possible exposure to the gas — and their right to sue — would leave the multi-billion-dollar company “destitute.”
If you have been in an accident at a Hyatt, the company is not on your side. But with the help of a lawyer, you can fight for compensation and keep your story from being swept under the rug.
Just as hotels have a duty to watch out for signs of unsound architecture or gas leaks, they also have a duty to assess the risk of violence against their guests and scale security accordingly.
Hyatt hotels operate in many parts of the world where security is a long-recognized challenge, seemingly without clear plans for keeping guests safe. For example, in November of 2021, guests of the Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun in Mexico took cover as armed men stormed the beach in front of the resort and killed two people, allegedly in a gang dispute over drug trafficking territory. Hotel security apparently played no role in the incident, and it was only due to luck and the whims of the shooters that more people weren’t hurt.
These kinds of incidents are by no means limited to international Hyatt locations. The prevalence of gun violence and other violent crime in many areas of the U.S poses its own threat to travelers, which Hyatt has not always been able to manage.
In February of 2024, police responded to the Hyatt Regency in Savannah, Georgia to find several shell casings lying around. Though the exact details of the event were never released, a woman and a man did arrive shortly afterward at Candler hospital, three miles away, both of them suffering from gunshot wounds.
Three months earlier, a woman was found shot to death at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta. Her killer had fled the scene, but police did later arrest a suspect.
One year before that, a man somehow gained keycard access to an empty guestroom at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan without checking in. Police believe the last guests to stay in that room may have dropped a keycard, which the staff failed to deactivate after check-out. The man reportedly remained in the room, undisturbed, for 14 hours. When a housekeeper later attempted to clean the room, she became ill on contact with a powdery substance the man had apparently left behind. Testing by the fire department pointed to the substance possibly being an explosive.
Another year back, a housekeeper at the Hyatt Place hotel in Sarasota, Florida discovered a man dead from a gunshot wound in his room. The man’s boyfriend was later arrested, partially based on footage of him leaving the hotel through a side exit with a gun in his waistband.
If you have been a victim of violence at a Hyatt hotel, a lawyer can help you establish what warning signs the hotel may have had, and what steps it could have taken to better protect you.
Sex trafficking has been intertwined with the hospitality industry for centuries, and some hotels still treat it as normal to host and profit off of the forced sexual exploitation of women, children, and other vulnerable groups.
Thankfully, culture and law around this issue have changed drastically in the U.S over the past decade. Companies that knowingly profit off of sex trafficking are now legally classified as sex traffickers themselves, and starting in the late 2010s, hundreds of victims have begun holding hotels accountable in court.
In 2018, a woman sued the Houston Hyatt Regency, among other hotels in the Houston area, in Texas’s first ever sex trafficking case against the hospitality industry. Just a year later, another woman came forward to sue another list of Texas hotels, this time farther north, including a Hyatt hotel in Frisco. The latter woman described hotel staff escorting her, along with other children, directly to customers’ rooms.
The Hyatt company’s alleged connections with sex trafficking are not contained to that first wave of civil suits. In January of 2024, newly unsealed court documents connected with the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case revealed that one of the survivors, Virginia Giuffre, had named Tom Pritzker as one of the men she had been forced to have sex with. Tom Pritzker is heir and CEO to the Pritzker Organization and current executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels.
So far, no charges have been filed against Pritzker, but it’s certainly worth questioning whether it’s possible for him to run a hospitality company that’s safe for vulnerable guests.
To collect fair compensation after an accident or violent incident at a Hyatt hotel, you’ll need to work with a lawyer who has experience representing victims of hotel negligence. Sooner is better when it comes to securing representation, but even if years have passed since the incident, there’s no harm in speaking with a lawyer about what options might still be available to you.
Even before you get the chance to sit down and search for a hotel injury lawyer in your area, however, there are a few things you can do right after an incident to maximize your chances of a fair settlement:
When you’re ready to look into legal representation, the Stoddard Firm is standing by to discuss your case in a free consultation. We’re experts in personal injury, wrongful death, premises liability, negligent security, and human trafficking law, as well as the innkeeper laws and franchise laws that govern the hospitality industry. We’re experienced in international litigation, and we’re not afraid to take on the biggest, most powerful companies in the world.
To learn more, reach out any time at 678-RESULTS or through our online chat function.
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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