Bedbugs in Motels and Hotels

Hotel guests all over the country are finding that they are being rented rooms infested with bedbugs -- apple-seed sized insects that feed on their blood while they sleep. But guests are fighting back, and they are collecting monetary awards from the courts to not only compensate for the loss of a good night's sleep, but also to punish the penny-pinching motels and hotels who would knowingly decline to exterminate the bedbugs.

As Motel 6 learned in the federal Court of Appeals case of Mathias v. Accor, 347 Fed.3d 672, hotels and motels can be found in liable for large punitive damages when they knowingly subject their guests to rooms infested with bedbugs. The Mathias case was important because of the size of the money award; the court awarded $186,000 in punitive damages to each of the two siblings who stayed for one night at a Motel where the managers refused to pay $500.00 for a bedbug extermination. The U.S. Supreme Court had recently set boundaries to limit punitive damages awards in the case of State Farm Mutual v. Campbell. In the bedbugs case, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is testing these boundaries to their limit.

Recently, Judge Cyril Bedford of the Housing Court granted a substantial abatement of 45% of the rent where the tenant's apartment was so severely infested with bedbugs that he was forced to sleep on a metal cot for six months (bedbugs cannot climb on metal).

Also in New York, two Mexican businessmen who sued Leona Helmsley's Park Lane Hotel claiming they were devoured by bedbugs there have settled their case for $150,000.

Of course, our firm has been the subject of much publicity regarding our obtaining redress for tenants in bedbug-infested apartments. Rest assured, this is not the last time the courts well have to address the failure to protest residents and guests in hotels and residential buildings.