Hotel Assaults and Injuries in Illinois

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When you book a hotel room, you expect a safe place to sleep. You don’t expect strangers to be wandering the halls, forcing their way into hotel rooms, or hanging out in the parking lots unchecked.  Unfortunately, insufficient security at Illinois hotels and motels has led to preventable physical and sexual assaults on guests by people who had no business being on the property. When that happens, the hotel itself may be legally responsible.

Under Illinois law, hotels and motels have a legal obligation to take reasonable steps to protect guests from foreseeable harm, including harm caused by third parties, like an uninvited or unauthorized person on the property. When a hotel knows, or should know, about a security risk and fails to act, it can be held liable for injuries that result.

Assaults by unwanted individuals often happen because of these security gaps:

Unsecured doors. Doors on the side of the hotel, at the stairwells, or at the pool area that should require a key card sometimes sit propped open or have broken locks. This gives anyone outside easy access to guest floors.

Inadequate front desk monitoring or staffing. When front desk staff don’t question visitors, verify room assignments, or limit non-guest access, intruders can simply walk past without being stopped. In some smaller properties, there is only one person at the front desk, and if they step away momentarily, there’s no line of defense.

Poor lighting and lack of cameras. Dark parking lots, hallways, and stairwells make it easier for an attacker to approach a guest without being noticed. A lack of security cameras and monitoring also make it harder for hotel staff to identify a threat before it escalates.

Failure to act on prior incidents. If a hotel has a history of trespassing or violence on the property, and they don’t take action to increase security, that can be a critical piece of evidence that the harm was foreseeable or predictable.

Giving room access to unauthorized people. When you stay at a hotel and ask for a room key, they are only supposed to give it to you if your name is on the reservation AND you show proper identification. Too often the front desk people fail to do this simple task and it leads to bad results.

The hotel has a criminal or negligent staff. We have seen cases where housekeepers and other staff were negligent with their universal key cards and had them taken. This allowed people to enter rooms and commit sexual assault. In other cases, the hotel hires criminals who access the rooms and steal, assault or rape.

Inadequate security. Many hotels host big events. Weddings, concerts, parties, corporate events, conventions, etc. Those events involve them bringing many people to their property, most who are not staying at the property. Often these people are being overserved alcohol. Fights and other aggressive behavior can happen. If the hotel has not ensured adequate security or allowed more people on the property than local ordinances allow, they can be held responsible for bad things that happen.

And of course there are injuries that happen due to negligence like wet floors, missing hand railings, ceiling collapses, and other errors.

These things should not happen and when they do, they are a lawsuit. And quite often those lawsuits are lucrative. In a recent case, two brothers from St. Louis were staying in a Chicago hotel. An uninvited guest entered the hotel, waited at the elevators, and went up to the guest rooms by following a registered guest who had a key into the elevator. He walked around the floors for about three hours without being observed or questioned by staff. He eventually assaulted both brothers who suffered physical injuries and emotional distress. To compensate for their injuries, medical expenses, and emotional trauma, the jury awarded one brother $18 million and the other brother $9 million.

If you were staying at a motel or hotel in Illinois and were injured by negligence or physically or sexually assaulted by someone who shouldn’t have been on hotel property, contact us. We can connect you to an attorney who has successfully tried these cases and can maximize your financial recovery. The attorney will work to hold the property accountable for failing its duty to keep guests reasonably safe. Every attorney we recommend works on a contingency basis which means that they only get paid if they win your case. And we only recommend attorneys we would refer family members or friends to.