Newcomb Hotel Co. v. Corbett
| Decision Date | 31 August 1921 |
| Docket Number | 11867. |
| Citation | 108 S.E. 309,27 Ga.App. 365 |
| Parties | NEWCOMB HOTEL CO. v. CORBETT. |
| Court | Georgia Court of Appeals |
Syllabus by the Court.
A guest in a hotel is entitled to the privacy of the room to which he has been assigned, and to remain there unmolested from improper or unjustified and unreasonable intrusion from the hotel keeper or those acting under his authority. Whether a hotel keeper is under a duty to protect a guest against third persons, it is not necessary to be here decided. See Newcomb Hotel Co. v. Corbett, 24 Ga.App. 533, 101 S.E. 713; Id., 25 Ga.App. 583, 103 S.E. 723.
Where a "night watchman" or "houseman" of a hotel, whose duty is to "Keep order in general and to look after things generally," including "anything that comes up," and who carries a pass key to the rooms and who is told by the clerk on duty that there is "something wrong" in a certain room in the hotel and is requested by the clerk to go to that room, and where such watchman or "houseman," in response to the clerk's request, goes to the room and opens the door with his pass key for the purpose of ascertaining what is going on in the room, the inference is authorized, if not demanded that the clerk and the watchman were acting within the scope of their employment, and that their acts were those of their employer, and for which he is responsible.
Where a guest of a hotel is occupying his room, and is neither engaged in nor permitting improper conduct therein, nor affording any just ground to suspect such, it is an unjustified intrusion upon the guest, and a trespass upon his rights incident to his occupancy of the room for the hotel keeper to effect an uninvited and unpermitted entry into the room for the purpose of ascertaining whether improper conduct on the part of the guest or any one is transpiring therein.
Since a hotel keeper has an opportunity of seeing his guests when he receives them, he is chargeable with knowledge as to what guests are assigned to particular rooms in the hotel, and therefore he has no right to assume that a guest who is occupying a room to which he has been assigned is any other than the guest properly entitled to occupy the room. While in order to facilitate his business in handling his guests, a hotel keeper may require his guests, when applying for accommodations at his hotel, to register their names in a register, he is nevertheless not thereby relieved, by any false inference he may draw from the register, from the duty resting upon him of knowing to what rooms the various guests are assigned. Thus, where a female guest has applied for lodging at a hotel and has signed her name upon the register without any prefix to her signature or other indication that her signature is that of a female, and is assigned to a certain room in the hotel, the hotel keeper is charged with notice that the particular room...
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