Opening Closed Doors: Can Hotels Do More to Fight Human Trafficking?
Photo Caption: Illustration by Sara Gelfgren.
Skift Take
Human trafficking touches every corner of the travel industry — especially hotels. And while the accommodations sector didn't create the problem, it does have an elevated responsibility to put an end to it. The question is: How effective have the industry's efforts been so far?
M.A.’s story is not unique, but that doesn’t make it any less horrifying. After leaving home to live with a friend in 2014, she faced being kicked out of her temporary residence. It was around this time, a complaint in a civil suit alleges, she met a person who began posting graphic images of her on the now-defunct classifieds website, backpage.com.
Facing violent threats from her trafficker, M.A. claims she was forced to sell sex for a period just shy of a year and a half. She was subject to visits by up to 10 johns per day. The victimization took place at multiple hotels in the Columbus, Ohio region — including properties branded by IHG, Wyndham, and Choice Hotels, which are all named as defendants in the pivotal civil case. She managed to escape in 2015, and her trafficker was convicted and sentenced to prison in 2017. Though she is an adult now, it has not been made public whether she was a minor at the time of the abuses.
“During the time period she was trafficked, M.A.’s trafficker often requested rooms near exit doors,” the complaint alleges. “Frequently the trash cans in the rooms in which M.A. was trafficked would contain an extraordinary number of used condoms. The trafficker routinely instructed M.A. to refuse housekeeping services. The hotel rooms in which M.A. was trafficked were frequently paid for with cash.”
While M.A. may or may not have been aware of it at the time, all of those indicators above were signs of human trafficking — ones that have become common red flags to watch out for in the hospitality industry’s widespread trainings on the issue in the past few years. Her lawyers claim the hotel chains she stayed at “knew or should have known” she was being trafficked, and did nothing to intervene. The corporate brand hotel defendants as well as the individual hotel properties, which were also sued, deny all the allegations.
It’s a common misconception that human trafficking requires some kind of movement across borders. But in reality, human trafficking's defining characteristic is not movement, but exploitation — it's using some form of control to commodify human beings. According to the UN's definition, trafficking is the harboring, transporting, or recruiting of humans through force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of commercial sex, forced exploitative labor, and other forms of servitude. The United Nations’ International Labour Organization estimated that
