Where a hotel guest was murdered in his room by strangers in the wee hours of the morning due to lack of hotel security, the hotel owner can be held civilly liable to his heirs for failing to exercise the required diligence.

A 30-year old Norwegian on a business trip to Manila checked in at a five-star hotel in Makati. On the day he was scheduled to check-out, he was found stabbed to death on his bed, with his eyes and mouth bound with electrical and packing tape, and his hands and feet tied with rope. The CCTV revealed that the victim entered his hotel room a little after midnight. After three minutes, he was followed by a woman. A Caucasian man then entered his room about two hours after. Both guests left before 6:00 a.m.

The crime was discovered only after a routine verification call from a credit card company to the victim’s residence in Oslo, Norway. Apparently, the very same Caucasian man who entered his room tried to purchase a Cartier lady’s watch in Glorietta, Ayala Center, using the victim’s credit cards. But when he was unable to answer the queries of the credit card representative, he hurriedly left, leaving the credit cards and passport of the victim. Because of the verification call, the victim’s family attempted to contact him in his hotel room but to no avail. They requested for the hotel manager to check up on him, leading to the discovery of the murder.

The victim’s family thus sought to recover damages from the hotel before the Philippine courts. Denying liability however, the hotel owner pointed to the guest’s own negligence since he allowed strangers to enter his room.

Affirming the Regional Trial Court and the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court held that the hotel was negligent, as it was in a better situation to foresee and prevent such a situation from happening. It was found that even before the murder, the hotel was already warned of its security lapses by its Chief Security Officer as there had been occurrences where personal belongings were lost. He recommended that one roving guard be posted per floor, considering the length and shape of the hotel’s corridors; however, his recommendation was disapproved for financial reasons. The hotel’s inaction with respect to their security problem or their failure to provide enough security constitutes negligence, which has been defined as “the want of care required by the circumstances” or “the omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided by those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or the doing of something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do.”

In closing, the Court said:
The hotel business is imbued with public trust. Catering to the public, hotelkeepers are bound to provide not only lodging for their guests but also security to the persons and belongings of their guests. The twin duty constitutes the essence of the business… We hold that there is much greater reason to apply the same if not greater degree of care and responsibility when the lives and personal safety of their guests are involved. Otherwise, the hotelkeepers would simply stand idly by as strangers have unrestricted access to all the hotel rooms on the pretense of being visitors of the guests, without being held liable should anything untoward befall the unwary guests. That would be absurd, something no good law would ever envision (Makati Shangri-La v. Harper, G.R. No. 189998, 29 August 2012, J. Bersamin).

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