Lawyer For Suing Staybridge Suites

Unsafe Conditions at Staybridge Suites?

Your rights and options if the hotel failed to keep you safe.

Staybridge Suites is an extended-stay hotel brand, belonging to InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG). It has over 300 locations, each one owned and run by a local franchisee. Below, we’ll go over common reasons to sue Staybridge Suites. If at any point you would prefer to speak directly with a hotel lawyer in Atlanta, feel free to reach out by phone or chat.

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Staybridge Suites Has a Duty to Anticipate and Manage all Foreseeable Risks to Guests

Whenever a business knows, or should know, about a hazard on its property that could predictably cause harm to its guests, it has a duty to remove that hazard if practical. If the hazard can’t be removed without creating a bigger hazard, or destroying one of the property’s functions, the business must take all reasonable steps to limit the danger, and warn guests about any remaining risks.

Without consistent maintenance, hazards can arise in just about any part of a hotel. A tear in a carpet can cause a trip-and-fall, for example, or a worn-out refrigerator can lead to food poisoning.

Complaints against Staybridge Suites for these kinds of general wear-and-tear hazards have included a jagged metal edge on a bedframe that allegedly cut a guest in Lincolnshire, Illinois, and a bathroom shelf that allegedly collapsed on top of a child in Houston, Texas.

Ideally, hotels should always be on the lookout for any safety issue on any part of the property. There are a few issues they need to watch for particularly closely, however, due to how common and potentially deadly they are.

The swimming pool, for example, is one of the most dangerous parts of any hotel that has one, especially for small children. The Staybridge Suites in Plantation, Florida had a close call with this in 2017, when a 3-year-old boy was found unconscious at the bottom of the pool. Thankfully, a bystander was able to begin CPR promptly, and the boy responded. Most drowning victims aren’t so lucky.

Carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning is another frequent and lethal issue for hotel guests. When fuel-burning appliances malfunction, they can easily fill guest rooms with this potent and nearly undetectable poison.

The Staybridge Suites brand had two apparent CO incidents in quick succession back in January of 2015, one in Canada in Oakville, Ontario, and one here in the U.S in Orlando, Florida. In the Oakville case, a mother and daughter were both hospitalized. In the Orlando case, one guest allegedly suffered permanent neurological damage.

Hotels can greatly reduce their guests’ chances of death or serious injury by keeping pool facilities and heating equipment in good condition, installing CO detectors, and providing lifeguard coverage for swimmers.

If you’ve been injured due to a possible maintenance issue at a Staybridge Suites, a lawyer can help you figure out what went wrong, and what the hotel could have done differently to make your stay safer.

Fire Is a Perennial Concern for All Hotels, Especially Extended-Stay Brands

Even if a hotel has no pool facilities at all and uses only electric appliances, fires will always pose a danger.

This is true for all physical businesses, of course, but the threat to human life is greater in spaces where people sleep, and therefore may take longer to notice and react to emergencies. Certain activities, such as cooking and doing laundry, also increase the odds of a fire starting. That’s why longer-term hospitality brands like Staybridge Suites tend to be more vulnerable to fire than brands that focus on shorter stays.

A Staybridge Suites fire started exactly this way in 2018. A guest at the location in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin apparently fell asleep while cooking, starting a fire that resulted in burn injuries to at least one person.

There are some things hotels can do to reduce the chances of a fire getting started, particularly making sure the building’s wiring is up to code and still in good condition. Electrical shorts are one of the most common causes of structure fires, accounting for about 24,000 accidental ignitions every year in the U.S.

Staybridge Suites has had this type of incident too. In 2015, a fire started inside a wall behind a kitchen at the Amarillo, Texas location and spread to the room.

Prevention is only a small part of fire safety, however. Regardless of how a fire starts, whether it’s a physical problem with the hotel, a guest error, a lightning strike, or even arson, hotels need to be prepared to help guests evacuate quickly and safely, and, if possible, contain or extinguish the flames quickly.

Bare minimum fire safety precautions for hotels include:

• Fire alarms in every room.
• Well-mapped and obstruction-free escape routes.
• Reliable emergency lighting.
• Regularly spaced hand fire extinguishers.
• Self-closing, fire-resistant doors.

Modern construction hotels should also have automatic sprinkler systems.

To Staybridge Suites’ credit, the Times Square location in New York handled a 2018 case of arson fairly well by all accounts. In that case, the arsonist lit three separate fires within the building, on the 3rd, 8th, and 18th floors. The hotel’s fire alarms worked correctly, and its security cameras captured footage of a suspect. The survivors reported that the staff even stayed long enough to check the rooms and make sure everyone got out. Two people were injured, but no one was killed.

Of course, IHG’s franchise structure means that one Staybridge Suites can’t be counted on to operate the same way as another. If you’ve been injured or lost a loved one to a Staybridge Suites fire, it’s worth discussing with a lawyer whether the hotel did all it could have to prevent or mitigate the disaster.

Violence Has Been One of the Most Consistent Threats to Staybridge Guests

Depending on a hotel’s location, crime is often a greater threat to guest safety than any kind of accident. Staybridge Suites guests have certainly faced their share of this kind of danger.

Within the last five years alone, Staybridge Suites have been the site of:

• A nonfatal drive-by shooting in Round Rock, Texas.
• A report of suspected domestic violence in Irvine, California, which led police to discover several homemade bombs in a guest’s room.
• A shooting at a teen party in Little Rock, Arkansas, which wounded one boy and one girl. Another boy was arrested in connection with the incident.
• A fight between three men in a room in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, involving a gun. The charges against the three included assault, aggravated menacing, and using weapons while intoxicated.
• An apparent murder-suicide between and man and woman in Rogers, Arkansas.
• Another apparent murder-suicide in Dallas, Texas, resulting in the deaths of a father, his two young sons, and a woman who had been staying with them at the hotel.
• The suspicious death of a woman in Holland Township, Michigan. Police would later arrest her son-in-law, who was seen fleeing the hotel in the woman’s car.

After an act of violence, it’s easy to focus exclusively on the “who” and “why” of what happened, while ignoring the “where” part of the equation. Survivors often dismiss the location of a crime as irrelevant and assume that the same thing could have happened anywhere.

Hotels and other physical businesses encourage this assumption, because it diverts responsibility away from them. In reality, a hotel’s security choices have a huge effect on the odds of violence on and even around the property.

Simple measures, like requiring a photo ID upon check-in, keeping common areas well-lit, and making sure security cameras are visible and effective, all make people less likely to enter the hotel with criminal intent, or to commit crimes impulsively during their stay.

More violence-prone locations may need additional precautions, such as a security guard presence, or physical access restrictions for anyone not checked in as a guest.

Whatever the risk of crime at a particular location may be, a hotel owner is responsible for assessing that risk honestly and taking appropriate precautions.

Staybridge Suites Have Hosted Several Confirmed and Alleged Sex Trafficking Operations

Sex trafficking is a multi-billion-dollar criminal industry, and it relies on physical venues like hotels to function. Like fire, this horrifically damaging phenomenon can take hold in any hotel at any time.

Regardless of a location’s general crime rate, every hotel should be prepared to recognize signs that a guest is being sexually exploited, and to respond in a way that puts the victim’s needs and safety first. Unfortunately, this is not at all what most hotels have historically done.

In June of 2015, a man was arrested at the Staybridge Suites in Hanover Township, Pennsylvania. He was ultimately convicted of sex trafficking a large number of women and underage girls, through the use of threats, physical abuse, forced drug addiction, and other common trafficking tactics. He apparently used hotels all over the Lehigh Valley area, including the Staybridge Suites, to hold and sell his victims.

As was common in 2015, the hotels faced no particular consequences for their role in exploiting those women and girls, even as the facts of what happened were confirmed in court.

Thankfully, the legal precedents surrounding sex trafficking have changed significantly since then. Any entity that knowingly enables or profits off of sex trafficking is legally responsible for the harm done to the victims, and ever since the first groundbreaking cases 2019, holding hotels accountable in court has become fairly common.

In fact, in 2020, two other women came forward to report also having been sex trafficked out of a Staybridge Suites in 2015. They sued not only the Staybridge Suites but 21 other hotels in and around Naples, Florida, which they say openly allowed their exploitation.

Since 2019, some hotels have become a little less welcoming to probable sex traffickers, but the industry’s trafficking problem is far from gone.

In 2021, the staff of a Staybridge Suites in Middleton, Wisconsin called police to report a guest they suspected of sex trafficking — but only after he had overstayed the time he’d paid for, and refused to leave. The guest was ultimately convicted of trafficking a 16-year-old girl he’d brought from Utah.

If you have been tricked or coerced into performing commercial sex acts at a Staybridge Suites, reach out to a lawyer to ask about your options, including the possibility of suing anonymously.

What to Do If You’ve Been Harmed at a Staybridge Suites

It’s always worth checking with a lawyer about your rights after an accident or attack, even if quite a bit of time has already passed. If the incident is fresh, however, you can help set yourself up for the best possible recovery by following these steps:

1. Protect yourself and your loved ones from further harm. If this means running away from an actively dangerous situation, do so.
2. Seek prompt medical care. This helps you start your physical recovery on the right foot, and also establishes an official record of your injuries.
3. Begin an evidence collection. This might include photos of the scene, communication with people involved, or a police report.
4. Limit contact with Staybridge Suites. While reporting the incident to the hotel itself can be helpful for creating a record of events, getting drawn into an extended discussion with a company you may need to sue is never a good idea. Wait for a lawyer’s assistance.
5. Hire a lawyer with experience in cases like yours.

At the Stoddard Firm, we have a passion for holding companies accountable when their greed or carelessness causes people harm, and an even deeper passion for helping survivors get the compensation they need to rebuild their lives.

We’re experts on hospitality law and franchise law, as well as personal injury, wrongful death, negligent security, premises liability, and sex trafficking liability.

To get started discussing your case with an Atlanta hotel lawyer right now, reach out through our online chat function, or by phone at 678-RESULTS, for a free consultation.

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