Glamorous 32 year old ESPN sports reporter, Erin Andrews is taking legal action against several hotels after she was secretly filmed nude inside hotel rooms through the door’s peephole in 2008 by a serial stalker.
Obviously we are following this story with great interest.
Andrews is suing Marriott International and Radisson Hotels International for negligence, emotional distress and invasion of privacy.
There has also been at least one other copycat incident that has been reported since the Andrews story. A family from Nebraska has claimed that their daughters were filmed from a hole drilled in an adjacent guestroom while staying at a hotel.
In both cases, the culprits approached a hotel and requested that they check-in to rooms that were adjacent to their victims that were identified by them. The hotels obliged without question. This allowed the culprits not only to confirm that their victims were staying at a hotel, but also which room they were staying in.
In another incident, we did a post HERE back in February last year about a Hollywood motel that upset a guest when they discovered that their room's peephole had been supposedly installed backwards - they were unable to see out, but others could see in!
From a seemingly simple unguarded acts, the hotels have exposed themselves to a storm of bad publicity and also face the risk of extreme financial penalty from legal retribution of the victims.
Accommodation establishments have a duty of care while providing guests a place of peaceful enjoyment. It will be interesting to see how the American legal system in the Andrews case will determine what the hotels' responsibility should have been.
In the interim it may be a good opportunity for accommodation providers to reflect on their privacy policies and in particular consider how best to deal with adjacent room requests.
So will the threat of litigation make the obligatory hotel peephole consigned to history? Well probably not, however they will soon all be fitted with a security flap.
