Hotel Ejects 100 Guests Saying It Had Been Sold - Ep. 7.399

welcome once again to lato's law here's steve lato noah tom and caleb all sent me a story and this is a crazy one out of florida but it's it's it's not a typical florida man story it's a florida business story and imagine that you're checked into a hotel for a week got a week's vacation you book a hotel you go down you're staying in the hotel one day they come by they knock on your room they go everybody out you go why is there something going uh the hotel has changed owners and a new owner wants you out so get out right now uh and that's what happened that's what happened in kissimmee florida kissimmee fox 35 news reports the story of nearly 100 guests forced to leave florida hotel after being told it was sold i didn't know it's for sale nearly a hundred tourists are looking for a place to stay after being kicked out of their hotel with nowhere to go this all went down at champions world resort in kissimmee kissimmee and i'm saying that because i've said it before and people always want to correct me and i think that word is actually unpronounceable no matter how you say it someone will say no no it's not that it's this which is even more difficult to interpret because they're saying in the comments or typing it so many of them say they got the call in their room saying that the hotel had been sold and they'd to get out of their rooms by 4 p.m so they had 4 pm to get out of the room so here's your drop dead get out one hotel guest explained that the man on the phone called indicated that he was the general manager and he'd just been informed the hotel had been sold that all the staff and guests needed to vacate the property today it does make you wonder i would imagine that to buy or sell a hotel it's not like monopoly i buy a hotel you flip a couple bucks into the bank and boom you got a hotel in real life buying or selling a hotel has got to take more than a couple minutes i suspect that the hotel sale had been pending for i don't know more than an hour a couple hours i'm joking had any more in a week a couple weeks right no matter how you slice it there was time to plan for the people who were to be there so fox 35 sent a reporter to the scene and saw people exiting the resort and watched a person who appeared to be working at the hotel going door to door checking rooms to make sure they were empty many of the guests leaving say do not know what they're going to do so for instance one guest said we don't have anywhere to go and our flights aren't for a few days i've already been i've already paid and this is a big inconvenience they obviously didn't let us know we booked it months ahead we've been here already a week and she'd come down from new england with 14 family members so there's 15 people and they got no place to go they got a flight in a few days and finding a hotel at the last minute can be difficult this time of year in florida many guests are worried about refunds now it turns out that the general manager said we've notified the third party agencies and they'd be doing a refund so i guess a lot of these people booked through one of those booking sites that you see on the television and if you did that you can then complain and say i got kicked out and then they'll give you your money back somewhere down the road presumably however one guest said her money is limited and having to wait for a refund is going to make finding a new place for her large family nearly impossible saying that it is a lot of us so it is not like we can just book one room or two and it's spring break everything is super expensive she added that her mother is disabled and she's also got some very young children with her on the trip which makes this kind of thing more difficult in addition she said the staff told her that they were fired also so if we can believe everything we've been told so far in the story which we very well could someone called the hotel and said everybody out guests leave staff you're fired um heck of a way to run a business another guest said he got into a heated argument the hotel staff after being informed he'd have to vacate his room he had planned a trip there three months ago partly to celebrate one of his kids birthdays and he said this is the quote we're here and we have to leave last minute they didn't give us no warning or nothing i'm not only broken i'm upset angry and i'm mad the new owners of the hotel reportedly plan to shut the power off to the hotel by 12 am effectively shutting the place down and forcing anyone that's hoping to stay until at least tomorrow out onto the street fox 35's reached out to some state representatives to see if they might be able to help so far no response back so the weird part about all of this this modern day and age and this is where it gets really confusing is that if i owned a hotel think back in the old days of you know 1800s you're in a carriage traveling on a dirt road and you come around a curve and there's a little a little a little village there's a square with a little lantern in the middle square and it's it's lit and you see there's a tavern there's a hotel and you pull up in front of the hotel and you walk in and there's me behind the desk kind sir have you in your rooms for the night yes i do how much i quote you price in gilders and did i say this is in america or not i forgot and you say ah i can do that and i say shall i send a young man out to fetch your luggage and you say please do and i young man that goes out and gets your luggage and you come back in he comes back into your luggage and i say send him to the emperor's suite and you go up and get settled in for the night halfway through the night the young man who handled your luggage knocks in your door and goes hey hotel got sold everybody out [Laughter] in that context you realize the absurdity of this because you'd say wait a second i just entered into a contract with you the contract was and again this is one of those situations where the contract wouldn't be spelled out or even in writing but everyone knows the contract was the contract was that in exchange view paying me a given amount of money in guilders i'm going to put a roof over your head and give you the accommodations that are in my hotel for one night if you booked for one night or two nights how long but the point is there is a contract there there's a contract there there's no question a contract is enforceable so if i kicked you out in the middle of the night you very well could the next morning walk over to the magistrate's office and say i'd like to sue that man over there for breach of contract kick me out the middle of the night after you took my money and uh breached the contract and being in my imaginary world the magistrate might call over the get over yourself trial right now what happened oh i sold the hotel doesn't matter you had a contract you'd win that case all day long but two problems one is most likely it get reduced to money damages meaning oh you probably get your money back and maybe something for your inconvenience maybe i say maybe it depends on the jurisdiction that we're talking about because remember they have gilders not dollars so when you check into this hotel in kissimmee florida you have a contract that says that they will put you up for this length of time in exchange for you paying this money which you paid by the way right these things are all paying advance you you usually says do you want to book this thing because the second you book it boom your money's gone now it might be refundable but the point is they take your money then not later so they've got your money you've checked into the hotel you're one day into a seven-day stay and come by and go oh the hotel got sold get out get out doesn't matter they sold the hotel you still get a contract with somebody but that's the problem in this day and age who's they contract with the hotels wasn't with us it was with the booking company booking companies and say no all we are we're just an app that connects people who want hotel rooms with people who own hotel rooms kind of like uber and cars just get together you people and give us a slice and so it can all get straightened out and if they give these people refunds down the road they'll mostly be made whole but it does get you back to the earlier questions why would you need to do it this way why would you sell the hotel on this date and why would a new owner then come in and kick everyone out on this date why couldn't the new owner just say you know something we won't book any more rooms but we'll just simply ask that the old owner the seller give us the money for the people who are there and then when they're out they can just leave why do they need to kick them out on such short notice that's an interesting angle because there's got to be something going on because doing it this way is much more dangerous than doing it the other way they've got a hundred people right now who are angry now that's not 100 bookings like for instance the woman who said that her family had 15 people in it that's probably one booking of several rooms so they probably got i don't know 50 40 uh booking contracts to deal with but every single one of those at the very least is a refund and possibly more now the problem of course is and the reason i say possibly more is that if you read the fine print which no one does on the app that you booked this on or the website you booked this on it's going to say in there that well we're taking your money for booking but if the hotel does something really really crazy and stupid you can't come after us you got to go after them and the new guy is going to go it's not me you're booking with the old guy so there's going to be so much of that kind of a mess and i don't know what these hotel rooms cost a couple hundred bucks a night maybe maybe more than that i guess because spring break and forward and all that but you know a few hundred bucks a night but to add it up if somebody wanted to do a class action on this they'd be able to get some money out of it but on the other hand the question is simply is that you're out a few hundred dollars here and you get refunded somewhere down the road you get most of your money back are you still gonna sue beyond that because the other thing is that the booking is also going to say regardless of what happens regardless of what happens um you are not going to sue us for consequential damages consequential damages being the damages which arise from the breach of the contract after the breach but we're foreseeable to the people who were involved in the contract and that they should have known would occur if a breach occurred uh and consequential damages can be waived in many situations many states uh but i'm not sure off top my head with respect to a hotel reservation in florida i'm not even going to go there in the figurative sense but that's a bigger question because even if you could many people are from out of state so if you live in new england you come down to florida and file a lawsuit to get a couple thousand dollars in damages or consequential damages or whatever you're looking at here even after you've been refunded a bunch of the money if not all the money for your booking itself it's a crazy story though because i can't imagine a situation where they actually needed to get everyone out and move on rather than just saying hey let's just let these last people stay and get it over with but who knows who knows so noah tom caleb thanks for sending it from the fox 35 news div out of kissimmee florida nearly a hundred guests forced to leave a florida hotel after being told it had been sold weird questions or comments below let's talk to you later bye-bye thank you for watching lateo's law an optimist is one who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 59,135

Keywords: lemon law, michigan lemon law, lemon law attorney, lemon law lawyer, http://www.lehtoslaw.com, steve lehto

Id: 2zQgVUcNLOc

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021