Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG Just Put Their Names on the Problem
Maybe you read the announcement and felt something tighten in your chest. Maybe the words “human trafficking prevention training” and the names of three of the largest hotel companies in the world landed on the page you were reading because you have lived inside this problem, not alongside it. Maybe it was the kind of room with a lock on the outside, a man who said he loved you, a phone hidden in a charger, a hundred men over a hundred nights, a hotel key card that opened the same door every week.
If that is you, you should know something right now. The same industry that is now publishing “survivor-informed” training videos has, in many cases, been the venue where you were bought and sold. The training exists because the danger is real. The training is free because the industry knows it has a problem. And the federal law that lets you hold these companies responsible has been on the books for years, waiting for you to use it.
This page is for you. We will walk through what the new training announcement actually means, what federal law gives you, who you can sue, how long you have, what proof you need, what a hotel defense team will try, and what your case is worth. We will tell you what we have seen in 27 years of trial work, what the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act does in plain English, and what we will do for you if you call our 24-hour line. Nothing on this page costs you a cent to read, and nothing about pursuing your case will cost you a cent up front. We work on contingency, we do not get paid unless we win your case, and we keep the conversation with you free and confidential.
If you are reading this for someone you love, the same protections apply. Families of trafficking victims have rights, and there are answers we can give you without knowing your name.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC, a trial firm that has spent more than two decades putting insurance companies and corporate defendants in their place in courtrooms across this country. We know the playbook the hotel defense team will run. We know how to beat it. And we know that the survivor comes first, not the case.
The Federal Law Already on Your Side: The Trafficking Victims Protection Act
The civil right you have to sue a hotel, a hotel chain, or anyone who profited from the trafficking of you is not new. It comes from a statute called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, or TVPRA, and specifically the civil-remedy provision at 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a). That section says, in language that is short and absolute:
“An individual who is a victim of a violation of this chapter may bring a civil action against the perpetrator (or whoever knowingly benefits, or attempts or conspires to benefit, financially or by receiving anything of value from participation in a venture which that person knew or should have known has engaged in an act in violation of this chapter) in an appropriate district court of the United States and may recover damages and reasonable attorneys fees.”
— 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a)
In plain English, the TVPRA does three things that matter to you right now.
First, it lets you sue the trafficker. That is the obvious part, and the trafficker is the first person on the list. But you knew that part already, and it does not help you if the trafficker is a person with nothing to take.
Second, and this is the part most survivors never hear about, the TVPRA lets you sue any other person or company that “knowingly benefited” from the venture that trafficked you. That word “knowingly” is the most important word in the statute, and the law reads it broadly. You do not have to prove the hotel chain CEO sent an email saying “I am okay with trafficking.” You have to prove the company took money from a setup that it knew about, or that it should have known about. The standard is what the law calls constructive knowledge. You are allowed to show the company should have known.
Third, the TVPRA runs in federal court. That means the case is heard in the United States District Court, the same court where federal crimes are prosecuted. Federal judges are used to trafficking cases. Federal juries understand what you went through. And the attorney fees provision in the statute, “may recover damages and reasonable attorneys fees,” is your guarantee that you can hire a trial firm like ours without paying anything out of your own pocket.
The TVPRA is the spine of your case. The state laws and the state courts add to it. The new industry training program you read about in the news adds to it too, because it is now in writing that the hotel industry knows its rooms have been used for trafficking. We will get to that.
What the New Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG Training Program Actually Means for Survivors
In late January 2026, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG announced they had built a joint human trafficking prevention training curriculum, that they were making it free to the entire hospitality industry, and that the program would be available in English and Spanish on the website of the nonprofit Protect All Children from Trafficking, or PACT. The curriculum was developed in partnership with PACT and with Unboxed Training and Technology, and is built around live-action video storytelling. The first time, the three competitors said, that they had collaborated on a shared training initiative focused on preventing human trafficking.
Katherine Lugar, the executive vice president of corporate affairs for Hilton and the president of the Hilton Global Foundation, said the quiet part out loud. “Today, we’re putting competition aside and partnering across the industry to ensure every hospitality professional has access to the most up-to-date information and tools they need to recognize, respond and report instances of trafficking.” The Hyatt executive who chairs the industry’s anti-trafficking advisory council, Joan Bottarini, said the curriculum was “survivor-informed.” The IHG executive, Rani Hammond, said the partnership was “a new, survivor-informed resource that can empower hotel teams to make a real difference in preventing human trafficking.”
What survivors and families should hear in those three statements is this.
The training is a written admission that the three largest hotel companies in the world knew, as of January 2026, that trafficking happens in their rooms. It is a written admission that the industry had to put together a joint, competitor-collaborative, survivor-informed program to address the problem. It is a written admission that hotel staff, the people who check you in, who clean your room, who watch the cameras, who notice the foot traffic, had to be trained to spot what was happening to you. And it is a written admission that the company that built the training, Hyatt, has an advisory council on this subject, which means it has had, in the formal sense, an internal anti-trafficking program and personnel, for some time.
For a survivor in the middle of a case, or thinking about one, those statements are evidence. They are admissions against interest. They prove the company had constructive knowledge. They prove the red flags you saw, the things you think they should have seen, were on the industry’s radar. The industry now trains its own employees to spot these exact patterns, and that training exists because those patterns happen in hotel rooms.
The program complements, rather than replaces, the work the American Hotel and Lodging Association Foundation has done since launching its “No Room for Trafficking” initiative. That effort, which Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG have all joined, asks hotels to do five things: train employees, establish anti-trafficking policies, report suspected trafficking, post signage that makes help available, and equip the housekeeping team to recognize warning signs. Marriott had already built a similar program that more than 2.6 million industry employees had completed by the time Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG announced their joint curriculum. The point is not which company went first. The point is the industry has now, in writing, in a press release, with its logos on it, told the world what it is doing about a danger it knows exists.
That is a powerful piece of paper when it is sitting on a desk in a federal courtroom in front of a jury.
Three Different Defendants You Can Sue, and Why Each One Matters
Survivors are sometimes told they can only sue the trafficker. That is wrong. The TVPRA, the structure of the modern hotel industry, and 27 years of trial work tell a different story. There are three different classes of defendant you can pursue, and each one is a separate door into a separate pocket of money and a separate path to accountability.
The local hotel and its owner. The property where the trafficking happened, the building, the rooms, the front desk, the night manager, the housekeeping cart, the cameras, the key cards. The owner is almost always a separate limited liability company. The LLC may have been set up precisely to put a shield between the building and the parent brand. We sue the LLC, and we also sue the individual owner if the LLC is undercapitalized, which is a common pattern. If the LLC is broke, we look through it to the individual who actually signs the checks.
The hotel management company. Many branded hotels are not run by the brand. They are run by a third-party management company under a management agreement. The management company is a separate legal entity that controls staffing, training, security, and policy at the property. We sue the management company when it failed to do the basic work of running a hotel without putting trafficking victims in harm’s way. When the management company cut training to save money, when it understaffed the night desk, when it failed to respond to prior complaints, those decisions are the management company’s decisions, and the management company is on the hook.
The brand, the franchisor, the flag on the sign. Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG are not, in most cases, the owners of the property where the trafficking happened. They are the names on the building, the standard-setters, the royalty collectors, the trainers, and, as of January 2026, the publishers of the joint curriculum. They benefit financially from every booking at every franchised property. In federal court, survivors have taken these brands to trial under the TVPRA, and courts have ruled both ways depending on what control the brand actually exercised. The harder the brand can be shown to control how a property operates, day to day, from the reservation system to the training programs to the safety standards, the more courts let the case proceed against the brand itself. In January 2025 a federal judge in Ohio refused to throw out a case against a major brand’s franchisee operator, ruling that a hotel that takes the room money while ignoring obvious warning signs is enough to put the question to a jury. In the spring of 2026, a federal appeals court in Atlanta ruled that ordinary room rental alone is not enough, but that “active support or facilitation of the trafficking operation” is. The principle from both rulings is the same. The brand’s name on the building is not a shield. It is a piece of the story.
We do not assume which defendant wins in your case. We sue all three where the facts support it, and we let discovery sort out who is responsible. Discovery in a TVPRA hotel case pulls the brand standards manual, the management agreement, the training records, the prior incident reports, the security footage, the franchise application. The picture becomes clear once the paper starts to come in.
The Red Flags the Industry Now Trains Its Own Employees to Spot
The single most powerful thing a survivor or a family can do in a TVPRA case is to describe what actually happened in the hotel room, in the lobby, at the front desk, in the parking lot, and let the picture match what the industry itself has already trained its own employees to see. The new Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG curriculum, the AHLA Foundation initiative, the Marriott curriculum, the No Room for Trafficking framework, all train hotel staff to recognize the same recurring patterns of behavior. The patterns survivors describe in litigation are the same patterns. The industry’s own training is the comparator.
The patterns the industry has told its own workers to watch for include paying for rooms in cash, day after day, especially in extended-stay and economy brands. Refusing to provide identification at check-in. A third party renting the room for an occupant who never appears at the front desk. The same person checking in repeatedly, sometimes for months, with different young companions. A steady stream of men going to one room, often at unusual hours. Requests for excessive towels and linens. Minimal or no luggage. Refusal of housekeeping, or “do not disturb” signs left up for days. Requests for rooms near exits. Visible security passes, room keys, or staff uniforms in the trafficker’s possession. Guests who appear frightened, controlled, or unable to speak for themselves. Guests who do not have their own money, identification, or phone. Reports of disturbance, of smell, of noise, of crying, that staff did not act on. The presence of minors in rooms with unrelated adults. Prior police calls to the same address. And, perhaps most telling, a person who registers a complaint or asks for help, only to be met with a desk clerk who looks the other way because the room is paid for.
If any of this sounds like your experience, that is not an accident. You are describing the same red flag list the industry is training its own staff to recognize. The industry has, in effect, published a checklist of the conditions it knows it has allowed to exist. The case we bring to a federal courtroom is built on that checklist, in the language of the industry’s own training.
The legal term for this constructive knowledge. The statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a), uses the words “knew or should have known.” When a hotel brand publishes a survivor-informed training program that lists, by category, the exact pattern of behaviors you were forced into, that is a powerful piece of evidence that the company should have known. The new training program is not a defense. It is a roadmap that the survivors’ lawyers use to show the company exactly what the company was supposed to be looking for.
The 10-Year Clock, and Why It Can Be Longer
Survivors and families almost always ask the same first question. Is it too late. The federal answer is no, almost certainly. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1595(c), the deadline to bring a civil trafficking case is ten years after the cause of action arose. If you were a minor when the trafficking happened, the ten years does not even start running until your eighteenth birthday. That means a survivor who was trafficked at fourteen has until they are twenty-eight. A survivor trafficked at sixteen has until they are twenty-eight. A survivor trafficked at ten has until they are twenty-eight.
Ten years is a long time. It is plenty of time to think, to find a lawyer, to make a decision, and to pursue a case. The federal law was written specifically to give trafficking survivors the breathing room that other civil cases do not have. Many state laws layer on additional protections, including longer deadlines and tolling provisions that pause the clock during periods of incapacity or minority. We map your state’s statute of limitations, including the state’s civil-trafficking statute and any related personal-injury or premises-liability deadlines, in the first week of our work together.
The clock matters, but the proof is what determines whether the case is winnable. That is where the next section comes in.
The Proof That Disappears in Days, and What We Do to Stop It
In a TVPRA hotel case, the evidence is everything, and the evidence is fragile. The single most important thing our firm does in the first week is send a preservation letter to every potential defendant, the hotel’s corporate parent, the management company, the security company, and any third-party vendors who held the systems, ordering them to stop deleting, recycling, or overwriting any document, video, log, or data that could relate to your case. We send that letter the day you call. The evidence clock does not give us the luxury of waiting.
What we are trying to preserve falls into a small number of categories, and each one is on its own clock.
Surveillance video. Hotel security footage is the single most perishable piece of proof. There is no federal law that requires a hotel to keep its video for any specific length of time. Most hotels operate on a rolling overwrite cycle, commonly thirty to ninety days, and many systems overwrite automatically on a much shorter loop. The video of you walking into the lobby, the man at the desk, the key card activating the door, the hours of foot traffic in and out of a room, the maintenance staff with their cart. All of it disappears on a schedule unless a preservation letter has frozen it. We send the letter the day you call, and we ask the court to impose sanctions if the video was destroyed after notice.
Key card and electronic door logs. The lock on the hotel door is not a lock. It is a record. Every tap of the key card is a timestamp, a room number, an entry or exit. The log of card reads can prove how many men went to the same room, at what hours, over what stretch of days. The log has a finite retention window set by the property’s policies, and it is the kind of record that gets archived and forgotten unless someone demands it. We demand it.
Reservation, folio, and payment records. PMS, the property management system, holds the room reservations, the folios, the payment methods, the credit card or cash, the identity of the person who checked in, the length of stay. Cash-only, third-party, and declined-card records are often the pattern that proves the property should have known. These records are durable but get archived on a rolling cycle, and we subpoena them early.
Housekeeping and maintenance logs. Housekeeping routes, maintenance tickets, complaints, “do not disturb” notes, and the work-order log tell the story of which rooms were being cleaned and which were not. A room held in “do not disturb” status for days while a stream of men come and go is a documented pattern, not a witness memory. The logs are short-retention and perish fast.
Police calls for service and incident history at the property. Prior calls, prior arrests, prior reports of disturbance or assault at the same address are the proof of notice and foreseeability. The hotel cannot claim the danger was unforeseeable when the police have been called to the same property before. These records are public, obtained through the relevant state’s public-records act, and we pull them early.
Employee records and training records. Whether the night desk clerk had been trained on the anti-trafficking policy, whether a prior employee had been the subject of a complaint, whether a manager had been warned, the training records and HR files are central. The new Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG curriculum, the AHLA Foundation initiative, the Marriott program, and the brand standards manuals, are all part of this record. The existence of the curriculum the brand published is not just a fact about the industry. It is a fact about what the company trained, and did not train, its own employees.
The guest or patient’s own records. Medical records, mental health records, counseling records. The records that prove the harm.
The good news for survivors is that, in the hands of an experienced trial firm, this is a tractable evidence project. We have the tools, the subpoenas, the local-counsel networks, and the litigation-hold muscle to freeze the evidence before it disappears. The bad news is that the evidence clock starts running the day the trafficking stops, and it does not stop until someone demands that the records be preserved. That is why the first week matters.
The Hotel Defense Playbook and How We Counter It
The hotel industry has a defense playbook. It is not the same as the insurance-adjuster playbook in a car crash, but the moves are recognizably the same. The defense lawyer, the corporate counsel, the insurance carrier, they all read from a shared script. We have read it too. Here is what they will do, and here is what we do about it.
Play One: “We never saw anything.” The hotel’s first move is to deny actual knowledge. The brand will say it had no system, no training, no policy that should have caught the trafficking. The franchisee will say it relied on the brand’s training and the brand’s standards. The management company will say it relied on the brand’s system. The defense’s goal is to push the knowledge to nobody. Our counter is the published curriculum. The industry has now trained, in its own words, its own employees to spot the exact pattern. The Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG joint curriculum, the AHLA Foundation initiative, the Marriott program, all of it. If the company trained its staff to spot the pattern, the company should have known when the pattern was happening. The new training is not a defense. It is the road map to constructive knowledge.
Play Two: “It was a criminal act by a guest, not our problem.” The defense will argue that the trafficking was the work of a third party, the trafficker, the buyer, the person at the door, and that the hotel had no duty to protect a guest from a guest. The counter is that the TVPRA is exactly designed to reach the venue and the company that profited from the venture. The “third party did it” defense was the first move the defense lawyers tried in the 1990s and 2000s, and the TVPRA, as written and as interpreted by the federal courts, rejects it. If the hotel took the room money while the warning signs were on the wall, the hotel was part of the venture.
Play Three: “You were a willing participant” or “You are partly to blame.” The defense may argue comparative fault, contributory negligence, that you accepted payment, that you did not call the police, that you returned to the trafficker. Every state has its own standard for whether those arguments apply to a trafficking victim, and in most states the law is clear that the coercive nature of sex trafficking defeats the comparison. The federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act treats the trafficking survivor as a victim, not a comparator. A jury that hears the full story of how a person was recruited, isolated, threatened, and controlled does not blame the victim. We do not let the defense sand off the story.
Play Four: “We never signed anything, and the contractor was the bad actor.” In franchised properties, the defense will argue the brand is a passive licensor and the franchisee is the operator. We discussed this above. Federal courts have ruled both ways depending on the level of brand control. The harder the brand can be shown to control the actual operations, the more the case proceeds against the brand. Discovery is the answer.
Play Five: “We’ll settle, but you sign an NDA and you never speak of this.” A hush-money offer is a real possibility. We do not tell survivors what to do. We tell them what the offer is, what the rights they would give up are, and what the alternatives are. Survivors who are early in their recovery sometimes choose silence, and that is a legitimate choice. Survivors who want their day in court get our full trial team. We respect both. We never let the defense use the threat of a fight to force silence.
These are not the only plays. There are more. But these five are the ones the defense team runs first, and the answers are well rehearsed. The hotel industry has a playbook, and so do we.
What a Hotel Trafficking Case Is Worth
Every case is different, and we will not quote a number out of context. But the range is real, and the range is meaningful.
Federal law allows you to recover your damages, your attorney’s fees, and punitive damages where the conduct shows reckless disregard or willful blindness. That is the language of 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a). Your damages include the medical and psychological care you have needed and will need for the rest of your life, including the cost of trauma-focused therapy, the medication, the inpatient and outpatient treatment, and the life-care planning that a serious case requires. Your damages include the wages you lost and the earning capacity you will not realize because of what was done to you. Your damages include the human losses, the pain, the suffering, the post-traumatic stress, the loss of enjoyment of life, the loss of consortium if you are married, and the loss of the relationships you would have built if you had not been trafficked. Your damages include, where your state permits it, the loss of the value of your life itself.
In TVPRA hotel cases, settlements and verdicts have historically run into the seven and eight figures, particularly when the evidence shows the staff ignored the red flags that the industry itself has now published in its training programs. A single survivor’s case can be worth seven figures, and a class or pattern of cases can be worth eight. We have seen jury verdicts in the tens of millions in cases that started with the same quiet phone call that you are about to make.
Punitive damages, in addition, are available where the conduct shows the kind of conscious disregard that the law calls willful blindness, reckless disregard, or fraud. A hotel that takes the room money while staff actively avoid looking at the warning signs is the textbook fact pattern for punitive damages. A franchise system that knew the brand standards were not being enforced at a particular property, and that kept collecting the franchise fees anyway, is the textbook corporate-knowledge fact pattern for punitive damages.
We cannot tell you what your case is worth in this paragraph. We can tell you that we will give you a real, complete, evidence-supported number when we have the medical records, the employment history, the life-care plan, and the records from the hotel. Until then, the right answer is that the law puts you in a position to recover substantially, and we will fight to make that recovery reflect the harm.
The past results of any trial firm depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Your case will be evaluated on its own evidence. But the law is on your side, and the evidence is recoverable.
State Law Adds Another Layer
The TVPRA is federal, but the state you were trafficked in has its own statutes, and many of those statutes add rights and remedies. Most states have adopted human-trafficking statutes that mirror the federal definition. Many states, including Texas, Florida, California, New York, and Illinois, have civil-trafficking statutes with their own deadlines and damage rules. Many states also have premises-liability and negligent-security statutes that apply to a hotel that failed to protect a guest from foreseeable third-party criminal conduct. Some states require hotels to complete anti-trafficking training as a condition of licensure, which means a hotel that did not train its staff was breaking state law in addition to missing a moral duty.
We identify every available state-law claim in addition to the TVPRA claim, because each one is a separate cause of action against a separate defendant or a separate pocket of recovery. We do not leave a single door closed.
How the Survivor Comes First in Our Practice
We have tried cases like this. We have tried cases worse than this, and we have seen the kind of damage that trafficking does to a human being over months and years. We have seen survivors in the middle of a PTSD episode that lasts hours, and we have seen survivors four years into recovery who are still working through the question of what was done to them. We have seen parents of survivors. We have seen siblings, and we have seen the case where the survivor did not survive.
The way we work is this. We are trauma-informed. We do not push. We do not call twice a day. We do not hand you a release form at the first meeting. We start by listening, and we start by telling you the truth about the law, the deadline, the proof, the value, and the cost. If we are the right firm to take your case, we will tell you. If we are not, we will tell you that, too, and we will try to help you find a firm that is. We work on contingency. Our fee is 33⅓% of the recovery before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win. The free consultation is free, the call is confidential, and the 24-hour line reaches a live person at our firm, not an answering service.
The recovery is not just money. Money is how the law measures what happened, but the law also recognizes that you were treated as a thing, and that the recovery is supposed to begin to undo that. Damages for pain, suffering, and the loss of the value of your life are not abstract. They are the law’s recognition that you were wronged, in a way that the law can put a number to, and that the wrong should be made right as much as it can be made right with money.
Our Trial Team
This is a federal trial case under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and it deserves a federal trial team. We have one.
Ralph P. Manginello is the managing partner of The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. He has been licensed in Texas since 1998, more than 27 years in the courtroom, and is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Before law school, Ralph was a journalist, and the discipline of asking the right question and tracking the answer to the source still drives his trial work. He has tried trucking cases, premises cases, refinery cases, and product-liability cases against corporate defendants who had teams of lawyers and tried to bury the case in paperwork. Ralph is the kind of lawyer who reads the entire case file, finds the one document the other side hoped no one would find, and uses it in opening statement. He has spent his career on the side of the injured, the bereaved, and the people the system is built to overlook, and he has the verdicts and settlements to show for it.
Lupe Peña is an associate attorney at the firm, licensed in Texas since 2012, more than 13 years of practice, and admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Lupe spent the early part of his career inside a national insurance-defense firm, the same firm that often defended hotels, trucking companies, and premises owners against the kind of claims we now bring on the survivor’s side. He knows how the defense values a claim, how the defense reserves a case, how the defense picks the IME doctor, how the defense uses the recorded statement, and how the defense uses the surveillance video. He uses that knowledge for you now, in English or in Spanish. Lupe is a third-generation Texan with family roots to the King Ranch, and the firm is a bilingual firm, with full consultations available in Spanish.
The firm has offices in Houston, Austin, and Beaumont, and we work with local counsel in the state where the trafficking occurred when the case requires it. We handle federal TVPRA cases in any U.S. District Court, and we have a network of trial-tested local counsel when the case needs to be tried in a state where the firm does not have a primary office. The free consultation is free, the case review is confidential, and you can reach the firm at any hour, day or night, at the hotline below.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a hotel trafficking lawsuit?
Under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1595(c), you generally have ten years from the end of the trafficking to file. If you were under eighteen at the time, the ten years does not start running until your eighteenth birthday. State law may give you additional time, and some state trafficking statutes have their own deadlines. The deadline is one of the first things we map when you call, because the answer can vary by state and by the age at which the trafficking occurred.
Can I sue Hilton, Hyatt, or IHG directly, or only the local hotel where the trafficking happened?
You can sue both. The local hotel, the management company that runs it, and the brand on the sign are each separate potential defendants, with separate insurance towers and separate pockets of recovery. Federal courts have ruled both ways on franchisor liability depending on the level of brand control. The harder the brand can be shown to control how a property actually runs, from training to security to reservation systems, the more the case proceeds against the brand. We sue all three where the facts support it, and discovery sorts out who is responsible.
I was trafficked at a hotel when I was under eighteen. Is the deadline different for me?
Yes. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1595(c), if you were a minor at the time of the trafficking, the ten-year deadline does not begin until you turn eighteen. A survivor who was trafficked at fifteen has until they are twenty-eight to file. State law may give additional time. The federal law was written specifically to give trafficking survivors the breathing room that other kinds of civil cases do not always have, and the childhood tolling provision is a critical part of that breathing room.
What if the hotel says it never saw any trafficking happening?
The hotel’s defense will be that it had no actual knowledge, but the TVPRA does not require you to prove the hotel had actual knowledge. You have to prove the hotel knew or should have known. Constructive knowledge is enough. The industry’s own training programs, the AHLA Foundation initiative, the Hilton/Hyatt/IHG joint curriculum, and the Marriott program all train hotel staff to spot the patterns of trafficking. If the hotel trained its staff to recognize what was happening to you, the hotel should have known when it was happening. The training is not a defense. It is a roadmap to constructive knowledge.
Do I have to report the trafficking to police before I can sue the hotel?
No. The TVPRA civil case is separate from any criminal case, and the federal statute does not require you to report to law enforcement before you can sue. You can file the civil case on your own schedule, within the federal deadline. In some cases, the civil case and the criminal case proceed at the same time, and a criminal conviction can actually help the civil case by establishing key facts. In other cases, survivors choose not to participate in the criminal case, and that is a legitimate choice. We will explain how the two cases interact in your specific situation.
Can I sue if the trafficker has already been convicted or pleaded guilty?
Yes. A criminal conviction of the trafficker is often a powerful piece of evidence in the civil case against the hotel, because it establishes the underlying trafficking that the hotel profited from. But the TVPRA civil case is a separate case, against a separate defendant, and it survives regardless of what happens in the criminal case. The hotel will argue that the trafficker was the bad actor and the hotel had nothing to do with it. The federal courts have rejected that argument. The case proceeds.
How much is my case worth?
We cannot tell you a number in this paragraph. What we can tell you is that TVPRA hotel cases have historically run into seven and eight figures, particularly when the evidence shows the staff ignored the warning signs that the industry has now trained its own employees to recognize. A single survivor’s case can be worth seven figures. A jury verdict in a strong case can be in the tens of millions. Your case will be evaluated on its own evidence, the medical and life-care records, the wage loss, the trauma diagnosis, and the hotel’s conduct. We will give you a real, complete, evidence-supported number when we have the records. We will never quote a number to get you to sign, and we will never promise a number we cannot prove.
How is a hotel trafficking case different from a regular personal injury case?
Three differences matter. First, the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act gives you a specific civil remedy against a wider class of defendants than a typical premises or negligence case. Second, the elements of the case are different. You do not have to prove the hotel was negligent in the ordinary sense. You have to prove the hotel knowingly benefited from a venture it knew or should have known was trafficking. Third, the evidence is different. The proof is in the reservation and folio records, the key card logs, the housekeeping notes, the surveillance video, the prior police calls, the training programs, the brand standards manuals. The case is built out of the hotel’s own paper trail, often more than survivor testimony.
Will I have to face the trafficker in court?
Most civil TVPRA cases settle before trial. The hotel’s defense team and the brand’s defense team know that the red flags are documented and that the jury will hear them. The defense team also knows that you have a strong federal right to recover and a strong record of recovery in similar cases. We work hard to settle cases for the full value before trial. If the case has to go to trial, you do not have to be in the courtroom. We can take your deposition and have you testify remotely, in some cases. Your decision about whether to appear, and how to appear, is one we will make together. We are trauma-informed. We are experienced with survivors. We will protect you in the process.
Does the new Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG training program help my case?
Yes. The training program is a written admission that the three largest hotel companies in the world knew, as of January 2026, that trafficking happens in hotel rooms. It is a written admission that the industry has a constructive knowledge of the patterns of behavior that surrounded your case. It is a written admission that the industry is training its own staff to spot those patterns. The training program is not a defense. It is a piece of evidence we use to prove the hotel should have known.
What if the hotel offers me a settlement with a non-disclosure agreement?
That is a real possibility, especially when the hotel’s conduct is documented. We will explain the offer to you in plain English. We will explain the rights you would give up, the alternatives you have, and the long-term consequences of a non-disclosure. We do not tell you what to do. Survivors who are early in their recovery sometimes choose silence, and that is a legitimate choice. Survivors who want their day in court get our full trial team. We have seen both, and we respect both.
I am a family member of a survivor. What are my rights?
Family members of trafficking survivors have rights, including the right to bring a wrongful-death claim if the survivor did not survive, and the right to bring a loss-of-consortium claim in many states. A parent of a minor trafficking victim may be able to bring claims in their own name. We will explain what is available in your state and your relationship.
Will the case be public if I file a lawsuit?
Federal court filings are public records, and the existence of the case will be on the public docket. The details of the case, including your name, will be on the docket unless the court orders them sealed. We file motions to seal the identities of trafficking survivors as a matter of course in TVPRA cases, and the federal courts grant those motions routinely. We will work with you on privacy protections that fit your situation.
Call Us. It Costs Nothing to Start.
The Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG training program is the industry’s admission that it knows what happened to you. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act is the federal law that lets you do something about it. The evidence is recoverable, and the deadline is on your side. The sooner you call, the more evidence we can freeze.
Our hotline is 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911). It is staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by a live person at our firm, not an answering service. The free consultation is free, the conversation is confidential, and you can reach us through our contact page if you prefer to write rather than call. We serve clients nationwide in TVPRA federal cases, and we work with local counsel when the case needs to be tried in a state where the firm does not have a primary office.
Hablamos Español. Lupe Peña, our associate attorney, is a fluent Spanish speaker who conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. If you or your family is more comfortable in Spanish, that is the language we will use. Our case review is free and confidential. The contingency fee means you pay nothing up front. We do not get paid unless we win.
If you have been trafficked at a hotel, or if you are the family of someone who has, the next move is the same. You call us. You tell us what happened. We tell you the truth about the law. If we are the right firm to take your case, we will say so and we will start. If we are not, we will say so and we will help you find a firm that is. The recovery begins with that first call.
Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — Legal Emergency Lawyers. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The free consultation is free, the evidence-preservation letter goes out the day you call, and the work begins.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.