night auditor for 30 years. i wAS MORE LIKELY TO HAVE PROBLEMS SUCH AS NOISE, SMOKING, DRINKING, AND TRASHED ROOMS WITH A LOCAL THAN AN OUT OF TOWNER, PAYING CASH WAS ALSO A SIGN OF POTENTIAL TROUBLE.
Well if you scream at them all the time it’s not so surprising there’ll be trouble.
The biggest problem we have here is not having the full story. many people have touched upon it but since the OP has gone radio silet, it’s going to be impossible to move forward beyond WAG’s.
Here’s my questions:
[ol]
[li]Why did your wife need a hotel room last night[/li][li]Was this reason relayed to the front desk clerk[/li][li]Did she try to pay in cash[/li][li]Did the Front Desk Clerk explain in any more detail why she was being denied[/li][li]Was your wife very intoxicated at the time[/li][li]Did your wife try to explain a situation to the front desk[/li][/ol]
That’s just the first few. Many people have offered valid reasons as to why they could have possibly done this, but without more data, the well’s runnin’ dry.
My family with our dog rented a local room about 1 AM but it was due to an evacuation because of a big chemical fire. I think the guy at the desk figured out why we were there , I did not tell him. We snuck the dog in but it turns out they were OK with dogs anyway.
I personally support your action, depending on circumstance, but–and it is not strictly relative to the “local resident refusal” OP–(pretend all caps here) this is exactly the kind of things hotel/motel people will refuse you for because they don’t want to get burned for many of the reasons already given.
It was a Red Roof Inn which we picked because it was close to where I worked then. We ended up staying 2 nights before we were allowed to go home. Found out later Red Roof Inns are OK with dogs.
We got $1000 from a class action suit for our evacuation. The chemical place was not allowed to reopen after the fire. It was a few miles away and I could smell the fire outside my house. Some people did not evacuate , they slept through the fire. But once they left home they were not allowed back in the area.
You could have said this more clearly, but if I’m understanding correctly, you think that I said jacobsta811 said something racist? No, I’m saying that in the South, they do seem to give someone being black vs white more importance than they do in the rest of the country. I just moved back to the South after being away for 16 years, and I’ve been pretty surprised by how openly racist it still is- especially after not having really experienced it for so long. And I don’t see how just any young woman seeking a hotel room is open to suspicion with no other factors being taken into consideration.
Old joke:
A man shows up late one night at a fancy hotel in London and asks for a room.
The desk clerk shakes his head and says, “Sorry, sir, we’re totally full. Booked solid. I have no room to give you. My apologies.”
“Are you telling me,” asks the man, “if the Queen walked through that door right now and asked to stay here, there’d be no room you could give her? None at all? You would turn Her Majesty herself out into the cold night?”
“Well,” says the desk clerk slowly, “I suppose if it were the Queen, we could find her a room.”
“Great!” says the man, beaming. “Just give me her room.”
I remember one time my sister, her girlfriend, and I wanted to stay at a nice hotel for an evening of fun (no partying, no inviting anyone over, etc). We were locals, and wanted to get a nice room, but couldn’t find anything available because they were reluctant to rent out a room to 3 young people like us. I didn’t blame them but it did suck. We ended up getting a Motel 6 room in town for the 3 of us and enjoyed a quiet night of watching tv, playing some card games, and having a few beers.
Now it makes a little more sense why we were denied from getting a nicer room that night.
Or screaming domestic dispute in the hall at 3am.
We once stayed in a nicer downtown businessman’s hotel, and were awakened at 3 a.m. by a screaming faux-fight going up and down our corridor among a party of drunks who were just returning after a night of partying. Repeated calls to the concierge didn’t get swift results, except the drunks were pissed that they were asked to quiet down and they started kicking the walls and doors of neighboring rooms.
We gave up and packed our bags and left at 4 a.m., and saw some of the drunks in question just beginning to be rounded up in the lobby. They did not look like tourists but like local hoods who were looking for a place to continue their drinking and fighting party.
When we got home, I emailed the hotel manager to complain and he reimbursed us our money. But we now have a horrible memory of this otherwise nice hotel and won’t be staying there in the future, which is just what someone upthread pointed out that managers dread.
You can be denied service by a business for any reason at all, except for membership in a protected class.
It’s possible for a business to come up with some arbitrary reason to deny service (“we don’t serve people who are wearing red shirts”), but if someone decides to file a civil suit over it, the business will need to provide a good justification for that policy, and NOT have a pattern that shows that they actually are discriminating based on a protected class.
In the present case - being denied a room based on the fact that you have a local address - on its face, that’s allowable, since “people with local addressses” isn’t a protected class. And if someone sues claiming some other sort of discrimination, it’ll probably stand up in court, since there are (as we are finding out) some very good reasons for not renting a room to locals.
As for what locals should do when they need a room…well, that’s not really the hotel’s problem. I sympathize - several years ago we rented a local hotel room after a bunch of interior painting made our condo uninhabitable for a good 36 hours - but your only recourse is to try a different hotel.
I wish people would stop saying that. Membership in a protected class is far from the only basis on which you can challenge denial of service by a business serving the public.
Again, do you have a cite that the practices described here are actually illegal?
I rented a room in my own town when I was about 24 or so. This thread I guess just shows me again that I have the most trustworthy face, like, ever. No one even batted an eyelash.
Yes: the common law rule I mentioned earlier. Except in Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee, the common law rule has not been abrogated.
Can you provide examples of cases in which a hotel has been subject to penalties for violations of this law?
I think you could normally talk your way into getting a room. If you seem like a reasonable person who is not going to party or do drugs it shouldn’t be a problem. When I was in my early 20’s a friend and I went down to Virginia Beach for a few days. I didn’t reserve any room, I knew there were plenty of motels there. However when I tried to rent a room they clerk said they didn’t rent to people under 25 years old. I explained that were were just down there to go to the beach, and weren’t interesting in partying or anything. The guy asked me where I was from, I told him the small town I was living in 200 miles away. He had been through there and seemingly based on that let me rent the room.
No.
Wow, I’ve never heard of this. There have been a handful of times when my wife and I have stayed at a cheap motel a few miles from our house and didn’t think to make advanced reservation. Once was when the inside was freshly painted and the fumes were unbearable. The other was a fumigation. In neither case did I tell the clerk at the front desk why we were staying, and in both cases, we just had a small bag of clothes and toiletries for the next day.
Perhaps it is because we are white and average looking, but I couldn’t imagine being turned down. I find it odd they would discriminate against locals, because 9 times out of 10 when I went to a party at a hotel/motel room in my younger years, it was usually when someone came in from out of town and figured ‘not my house, so anything goes’. This is particularly the case with Comic-Con and other high-profile conventions.