Ritz-Carlton Accused of Adding Illegal Automatic Gratuity to Customer Bills [DISMISSED]
by Erin Shaak
Last Updated on May 10, 2024
Fox v. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Llc
Filed: November 28, 2017 ◆§ 1:17cv24284
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC is facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by a Florida man who alleges the hotel chain illegally adds an automatic gratuity to bills for food and beverages without including sufficient notice.
May 10, 2024 – Ritz-Carlton Automatic Gratuity Lawsuit Dismissed
The proposed class action lawsuit detailed on this page was dismissed on January 4, 2024.
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In a 17-page order filed that day, U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal denied the plaintiff’s motion for class certification after finding that the man’s counsel had a conflict of interest and thus could not adequately represent the proposed class.
The judge noted that the plaintiff’s lawyers, one business day after they first sought class certification in the Ritz-Carlton case in 2021, voluntarily dismissed three “copy-cat” lawsuits asserting identical claims against other global hotel companies.
Judge Singhal agreed with Ritz Carlton’s argument that the counsel’s “willingness to abandon three different classes demonstrates that they place their own financial and personal interests over the classes’ interests.”
“Class counsel must act with unwavering and complete loyalty to the class members they represent, and it just does not appear to the court that it is,” the judge wrote.
Judge Singhal also found that the plaintiff’s claims failed because they could not be evaluated on a class-wide basis. Instead, the judge wrote, the man’s claims would require 24 “distinct, case-specific inquiries” into each of the 24 Ritz-Carlton-owned restaurants he alleged deceptively charged an automatic gratuity.
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The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC is facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by a Florida man who alleges the hotel chain illegally adds an automatic gratuity to bills for food and beverages without including sufficient notice. The complaint claims the defendant, which operates various restaurants in its hotels and offers room service to guests, violates Florida state law in the following ways:
- not including notice of the automatic gratuity on menus and customer bills;
- presenting the notice in small, difficult-to-read font;
- including the notice only on the back page of the menus;
- notifying customers that the automatic gratuity could be adjusted or removed, but including it on bills as a “service charge”; and
- including the gratuity in the calculation of taxes added to customers’ bills.
The plaintiff says he visited several Florida Ritz-Carlton locations at which he was charged an illegal automatic gratuity without being properly notified.
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