Duff on Hospitality Law

Service charges, administrative charges, surcharges, house fees—whatever you call those charges assessed for food and beverage service in restaurants and in hotels—the rules about how they need to be disclosed to guests and how they must be allocated are propagating. More and more cities, municipalities and other local legal bodies are taking on service charges in detailed laws, and we expect more to come.

Interest in this issue at all levels of lawmaking seems to be increasing as living wage/minimum wage raise efforts become more and more popular throughout the country. Many such efforts result in laws that also affect how service charges may be collected, distributed and how they must be disclosed to consumers. In other words, the locus for relevant law in this area has shifted significantly from the state to the county or city level.

Hospitality industry stakeholders who host sites for online reviews or rely on review sites such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, Urban Spoon, or Oyster, may take comfort in the recent Ninth Circuit decision regarding the liability of the publishers of those reviews. See Kimzey v. Yelp! Inc., No. 2:13-cv-01734 (U.S.D.C. Wash. Sept. 12, 2016). But, there is an argument to be made that the protections afforded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”) may be wearing thin. As the industry looks for more ways to leverage data harvested  from online reviews, it is slipping out from the protective umbrella afforded to “passive hosts” of user generated content.