UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was on his way to an investors’ day at one of New York City’s largest hotels when he was shot and killed on the sidewalk outside.
The hotel, New York Hilton Midtown, was slated to host Thompson and other leaders of the Minneapolis-based healthcare company to discuss strategic priorities and 2025 outlooks on Dec. 4. But the CEO was fatally shot just seconds before he would have entered the hotel.
“We are deeply saddened by this morning’s events in the area and our thoughts are with all affected by the tragedy,” a Hilton spokesperson told Hotel Dive Wednesday.
In the wake of the shooting, police taped off part of West 54th Street near a side door to the New York Hilton Midtown, but the main entrance remained open, and “hotel guests continued traipsing in and out,” according to The New York Times.
The incident highlights the paradox at the heart of hotel security issues: Hotels need to be open and welcoming while also insulated enough to keep their environment safe. Hotel Dive spoke to security and legal experts about how hotels can straddle that line — and how to prepare for unlikely scenarios.
Staying safe
“If you left security to a security expert, trust me, you'd be secure,” said William Marcisz, president of Orlando, Florida-based Strategic Security Management Consulting. “There'd be high walls, no windows, barbed wire. … But that's the problem, nobody's getting in. And this is a business.”
Marcisz said the relative lack of surveillance cameras in hotels underscores hotels’ security struggles. While lobbies and entrances usually have them, cameras are often absent elsewhere on a property, he said.
“Hotels tend to not put them in,” he said. “[A hotel is] like your home away from home. … There's a privacy issue there.”
Marcisz said the best thing hotel managers can do, often, is to train their front-line employees to have “situational awareness.” Training can teach employees to spot suspicious activity and potentially prevent incidents like sexual assault and trafficking, which are known to take place at hotels.
When an employee flags something, the best-prepared hotels have policies in place that ensure staffers follow set procedures when handling incidents. “The policies are really important,” Marcisz said.
These scenarios often rely on a front-desk employee to flag something, though, which means hotel managers need to consider the “qualities of the person that you're hiring into these roles,” Marcisz added. “You have to have a lot of supervision and training.”
Expecting liability
Hotels aren’t expected to anticipate anything as shocking as last week’s event outside the New York Hilton Midtown, legal experts told Hotel Dive. But they are responsible for protecting guests from more common dangers.
“Hotels do have a responsibility to keep guests safe from third-party crimes, even on sidewalks,” said attorney Theresa Troupson, a partner at Liner Freedman Taitelman and Cooley in Los Angeles. “But that responsibility only extends to protecting guests from reasonably predictable criminal acts.”
“If the same or a similar act had never happened at the hotel before, courts would usually not hold the hotel responsible,” Troupson added.
“If it's a freak incident, there's no liability,” said John Perlstein, a personal injury and wrongful death lawyer in Los Angeles. “Just like any business that offers services to a consumer or to the general public, they have an obligation and a duty to act reasonably under the circumstances, which would include providing reasonable protection for those who are coming on the property.”
Hotels with more frequent incidents, however, can be expected to anticipate certain security issues, Perlstein added. If a drug deal has occurred on a property, for instance, the hotel is likely to tighten its security because “it would be more foreseeable somebody would get hurt in that regard,” he said. “But [hotels] can't ensure everybody's safety.”
Hosting history
At New York Hilton Midtown, ensuring safety for every guest would be a tall order — the hotel has “generally seen history go by since opening its doors in the 1960s,” The New York Times reported, including Donald Trump’s presidential victory speech in 2016 and an Elvis Presley press conference. “Hotels are meant to absorb whatever happens,” the reporters wrote.
In the days that followed Wednesday’s shooting, though, another accommodation provider emerged as a focus of investigation: a hostel where the suspected gunman allegedly stayed.
On Thursday, New York police released surveillance camera images of the suspected shooter at the check-in desk at the HI New York City Hostel in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to ABC News. HI Hostels did not respond to a Hotel Dive request for comment.
Marcisz said his security work has shown that incidents happen everywhere in hospitality, from luxury resorts to budget hotels.
“You're open to the public, and you're really stuck with that,” he said.
