No Vacancy: Duff on Hospitality Law : Northwest Attorneys & Lawyers for Hospitality, Travel & Tourism based in Seattle

Days 2 and 3 at this year's ALIS conference were filled with numerous highlights, including a very well attended presentation (or should I say, political commentary) in the Nokia Theater by "the Donald" himself, Mr. Donald Trump.  Days 2 and 3 were also filled with hundreds of meetings by conference attendees in nearly every hallway and corner of the hosts JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton.

While optimism continued to be the theme most often heard in the meetings I attended, the optimism was far from unbridled.  With so many unknowns remaining in the world (e.g. European debt crises, continued high unemployment, the upcoming presidential election), nearly everyone recognized that the many signs pointing to an industry rebound could quickly change.

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Room Key, a brand new player in the on-line hospitality market, launched in beta on January 11, 2012 to some excitement and some hard questions. Room Key is a joint venture among six U.S.-based hotel chains—Choice Hotels International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels*, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott International* and Wyndham Hotel Group—that allows users to search for available rooms at almost all of the chains’ global properties, or about 23,000 rooms total. More Kayak than Expedia, users search the Room Key site for inventory and are then redirected to the individual property (or chain’s) home site to complete booking. The idea is to drive traffic to the hotel websites and away from on-line travel agencies (OTAs) like Expedia, Priceline, and Travelocity. And, of course, to provide a customized, personable hotel booking experience to the user--and who better to do that then a group of hoteliers--says CEO John Davis.

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This week's post comes courtesy of Cairncross & Hempelmann attorney, Margaret Breen and highlights changes to the Washington State and United States definition of "service animal' as it relates to required accommodations in public places, such as hotels, motels and restaurants.

Both the Washington legislature and the U.S. Department of Justice have acted recently to specify what is and is not a service animal requiring accommodation in public places and to limit abuses of the Americans with Disabilities Act by extreme animal lovers.

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Lately, we’ve been hearing from a number of our clients and friends in the industry of a startling increase in the number of letters and emails alleging patent infringement. As hospitality- and restaurant-industry businesses become bigger and bigger users of patentable technology, we expect we may see many more of these claims. In an effort to provide a straightforward set of guidelines to our clients and friends, I went to my litigation partner, Tom Richardson, who happens to be defending a number of alleged patent infringement claims right now, and good friend and patent attorney, Charles Moore, and asked them for a streamlined checklist of how to handle receipt of such a letter or email. Tom brings over 35 years of litigation experience to a broad range of complex cases, including anti-trust and business torts; securities; trademark, copyright and patent disputes; complex commercial contract cases; and product liability and warranty claims and risk avoidance. Charles is a patent attorney with the Portland, OR intellectual property firm of Alleman Hall McCoy Russell & Tuttle, LLP, where he represents clients in a variety of patent matters, including helping them defend against patent troll claims, and preparing and prosecuting patent applications before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Charles also has over 13 years of in-house practice, most recently as Senior IP Counsel with Hewlett-Packard Company. Here are their suggestions:

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We rarely publicly celebrate the successes of our hospitality and tourism clients. Tuesday's launch of the proposed Seattle Tourism Improvement Area (STIA) initiative at The Pacific Science Center is one of the best reasons I've seen in some time to break that rule. 

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Customer Internet access, preferably wireless, is expected in the hospitality industry. Unfortunately, some guests and customers use the Internet access and computer networks you provide to break the law. Specifically, they infringe copyrights by uploading and downloading illegally obtained copies of movies, songs and television clips that are probably themselves illegally obtained copies of copyrighted works, which enterprising persons then illegally post to publicly available Internet sites for download or further sharing (read: illegal copying).

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Last week the Seattle Hotel Association presented the 6th installment of its annual symposium and economic forecast. Like years past, this year's program featured a terrific line up of local and regional experts, including Matthew Gardner (Gardner Economics), Vail Brown (STR), Lee McCabe (Expedia), Chris Kraus (PKF) and Tom Norwalk and Jerri Lane (Seattle King County Convention and Visitor's Bureau). Local general managers and directors of sales and marketing have come to rely on the Association's annual symposium as an important part of their annual budgeting process.

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In this week's post, Employment Law guru, Diana Shukis, offers insight into the complex and fascinating conflicts arising from Washington state's Medical Use of Marijuana Act. 

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This week, our newest CH& Hospitality, Travel & Tourism team member, Margaret Breen, offers her insights into navigating the recently implemented federal regulations designed to help protect purchasers and recipients of gift cards/certificates.

After some delay, the new federal regulations giving gift card holders greater protections took effect recently, adding to a patchwork of state consumer laws already in place. The new regulations apply to both issuers and sellers of store gift cards, gift certificates, and general use prepaid cards, such as prepaid Visas or Mastercards, sold after August 22, 2010. We’ve seen our clients consider conflicts between state and federal law, advertising policies for resellers, tax recognition on gift card income, and unclaimed property laws.

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Our friends at Seattle's Convention and Visitors Bureau have issued a "Call to Action" regarding Substitute House Bill 1371: Boards and Commissions.  They have requested our help with the following:

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Wednesday marked the end of another Americas Lodging Investment Summit (ALIS) Conference. This year's Conference celebrated the 10th anniversary of the venerable hospitality development and investment conference held each year in sunny Southern California.

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Happy New Year (belated)!  The new year means new opportunities, and in the Hospitality industry that means it’s events time! The calendar of upcoming events is varied, but here are a couple that I plan to attend:

ALIS (America’s Lodging Investment Summit): My partner, John De Lanoy and I will both attend this San Diego event, January 24 through 26. According to the website, ALIS is the “leading and largest hotel investment conference in the world, attracting more than 7,000 delegates from around the globe over the past three years.” If you plan to attend, and you’d like to get together, please email me.

2011 Hospitality Law Conference: Held at the Omni Houston Hotel in Houston, Texas, this event covers the latest trends and issues in hospitality law. This year, I’ll be speaking at the conference on the topic of distribution. I would love to meet up with you in Houston; just send me an email and let’s get together.

Of course, I’ll be providing updates and a thorough follow up after each conference. If there is a topic to be covered at either of these events that you’d like particularly to hear about, please let me know and I’ll do my best to cover it.
 

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Given the recent attention paid by clients to local security issues (including the recent and well received Hotel Industry Security Forum sponsored with the Washington Lodging Association – see Ruth Walter’s recent post on this event), I thought it a good time to review the obligations imposed by law on hoteliers and restaurateurs in Washington and Oregon to protect their guests and customers from crimes committed by third parties.  In other words, what responsibility does a hotel or restaurant owner have for guests or customers who are injured (or whose property is damaged or stolen) by criminals.  As I explain below, the more a hotel or restaurant owners knows about potential criminal conduct at her establishment, the more likely it is that she may be held responsible for not warning and/or protecting her guests or clients against it.

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For those of you that routinely purchase split cases of wine, December 8 is an important date. On December 8, the Washington State Liquor Control Board will hold public hearings in Olympia on proposed regulatory changes that would authorize wine distributors to collect handling fees from hotels, restaurants and other retail licensees that order and receive split cases of wine. A complete copy of the proposed regulation -- including the criteria that a distributor must follow to impose the handling fee -- is available here. As you may have already guessed, the newly proposed rule is the result of a request made by the Washington Beer and Wine Wholesalers Association.

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Hospitality team member Sandip Soli, reports on the International Council of Shopping Center's annual U.S. Shopping Center Law Conference. Sandip is a partner in our Real Estate practice. He works closely with many of our hospitality clients, in addition to a wide range of technology and retail clients, on a wide variety of real estate and construction issues.

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Missouri governor Jay Nixon signed HB 4211 into law on July 8, adding another point in the travel agent column in the contest with hoteliers, cities, counties and states over hotel/motel occupancy tax issues. The Missouri law codifies the current practice of all municipalities that assess occupancy taxes, namely, the hotels pay tax on the income they receive for their rooms and the travel agents (primarily on-line travel agents or OTAs) pay nothing. No occupancy tax, that is. Normal corporate income tax applies.

This is the latest in a series of disputes at all levels of play on occupancy taxes, including municipal lawsuits against large OTAs for back taxes owed as a result of the wholesale or “merchant” model used by those OTAs, to federal legislation proposed by the Interactive Travel Services Association and opposed by the AH&LA (but supported by, for example, the California Lodging Industry Association), to these types of state efforts to unify the taxation practices of their municipalities.

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A pair of recently effected state laws makes clear that information security remains a significant issue that receives and will continue to receive considerable legislative and commercial attention. Hoteliers, restaurateurs and others in the hospitality industry use personally identifiable information (PII) of their guests and customers to improve services and create a personalized experience.

Greg and I attended the annual Hospitality Law Conference in Houston this February, which devoted an entire track to data privacy issues. It’s the definition of a hot topic, and important, so please take note!

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