LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) - A serial plaintiff and his lawyers lost a pair of cases that could indicate more defeats to come, as a federal judge in California dismissed claims hotels violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to include detailed descriptions of their ADA-compliant features on internet reservations systems.
Attorney Russell Handy with the Center for Disability Access has filed hundreds of similar lawsuits including more than 100 this month alone, according to federal court records. Arroyo, who describes himself as a paraplegic and frequent traveler, is one of seven plaintiffs Handy uses for many of the complaints, according to a defense lawyer.
The lawsuits mostly claim hotels failed to comply with the ADA by not including dimensions and other details disabled people need to decide whether to rent rooms. In one of the lawsuits that was dismissed, Arroyo’s lawyers said the Fairfield by Marriott Anaheim Resort “failed to identify and describe the accessible features in the guestroom …in enough detail to reasonably permit him to assess independently whether the particular room met his accessibility needs.”
Arroyo “not only travels frequently but is always on the lookout for businesses that violate the law and discriminate against him,” the lawsuit said.
Marriott argued the description Arroyo found lacking was actually on the Expedia reservations site, not its own, and it complied with the ADA in any case. In a Feb. 16 ruling, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney agreed.
Nothing in Arroyo’s complaint “suggests that the alleged deficiencies on Expedia’s website was due to Defendant’s failure to make information available to Expedia,” the judge ruled, dismissing the complaint with prejudice. More importantly, the ADA and subsequent Justice Department guidance both make it clear hotels don’t need to do anything more than identify if they are accessible, basic details about the rooms and whether they have roll-in bathing facilities and ADA-compliant communications features.
The judge dismissed a second complaint against another Marriott, also over website details, on Feb. 18. The decisions could affect hundreds of similar cases “because they are persuasive authority for the other judges with motions to dismiss before them,” said Minh N. Vu, a partner with Seyfarth Shaw who did not work for Marriott on the case but does represent defendants in similar cases. “The legal issue is the same in all these cases.”
The rulings also match other judicial decisions in the Ninth Circuit, Vu said, as well as DOJ’s past enforcement actions.
Disability lawsuits have surged in recent years as lawyers experiment with different legal theories far beyond the original focus of the law, which was architectural barriers to access like lacks of wheelchair ramps. They now include website accessibility lawsuits and serial plaintiffs who file “drive-by” ADA suits without any evidence of actually having entered a business.