Hotel mis-management

Pushpa Girimaji

Last month, a friend of mine had gone on a vacation with her husband to a holiday resort. Apparently, the resort was being expanded and the construction work was going on in one part of the building. Two days into the vacation, my friend and her husband were waiting for a cab to take them out, when a huge glass from the building-under-construction fell on her husband’s head and split it into two. He was rushed to a hospital, but did not survive. Could you please suggest the steps that she needs to take to ensure that this does not happen to others and also force the hotel to cough up adequate compensation for the tragic and sudden death of her husband? She has two young children to look after.

This is truly very tragic and highlights the callous indifference to safety exhibited by the hotel. If they were extending the hotel building, it should have been completely cordoned off to prevent any building material from falling on someone. This was a very basic safety precaution. The very fact that a glass from the construction site fell on a guest of the hotel shows that even this basic safety arrangement was not in place at the hotel. I hope the police has shut the hotel and will not allow its reopening till it gets a full safety certificate.

As for your friend, she must keep the hotel bills, the doctor’s prescriptions, bills, death certificate pointing to the cause of the death, eyewitnesses account, if any, etc. Usually, the compensation is based on how much the person was earning, his future prospects, etc. So she will also have to provide all that information. In addition, the courts also award compensation towards loss of consortium, besides punitive damages and cost of litigation. 

She could file the case in the civil court or before the consumer court. I would suggest the latter because it is relatively quicker. In her petition before the consumer court, she should also ask for directions to all hotels on maintaining certain basic safety norms or direct the union ministry of tourism to come up with a scheme to ensure the safety of all hotels in the country. In the US, for example, safety specialists provide third-party safety accreditation to hotels. In India, too, we need to have such mandatory safety certification for hotels. 

I must mention that this is not the first mishap of this sort happening in a hotel. Some years ago, a young boy fell from one of the upper floors of a five-star hotel in Delhi. Safety demands that the railings on each floor be tall enough to prevent children and even adults from falling over. Similarly, the gap between the railings should not be large enough to allow a child to slip through and fall down. If the specifications in the National Building Code are followed strictly, such mishaps could be prevented. 

In another case about a decade ago, a 26-year-old woman had died in a five-star hotel in Mumbai, when a glass pane from a window got detached and fell on her, slicing her head into two, even as she was walking towards the hotel’s swimming pool. 

There have been at least two cases of hotel guests falling into the elevator shaft because the elevator door opened even when the car was not in position, indicating the poor maintenance of the lift by the hotel management. All these cases demand that hotels pay more heed to safety. 

Can you please quote for my benefit, a decision of the apex consumer court that would help me in my case? 

In Manisha Chhabra Vs the Director, Tamil Nadu Tourism Development Corporation, the honeymoon at a hotel run by the TNTDC turned into a tragedy for the newlyweds, thanks to the carelessness of the hotel. Manisha and her husband checked into the hotel on December 19, 1993, at about 8.30 pm. Soon after, her husband noticed a small door on the western side that was just latched. Assuming it to be a storage space or balcony, he opened it and stepped out, only to fall to the ground 35 feet below. He did not survive the injuries suffered by the fall. 

In her complaint before the consumer court, Manisha pointed out that the hotel should have at least put a grill or a balcony outside the door to prevent such a fall. Or locked the door and put a warning on it. Absence of any of these measures constituted negligence, she argued. The apex consumer court took serious note of the negligence of the hotel and awarded Rs 5 lakh, along with 10 per cent interest calculated from 1993-the date of the accident till the date of the award in 2003. Of course, that was still a small amount of compensation, but today, the courts take a more serious view of such negligence and the award of damages is far more just.