Duff on Hospitality Law

My final client OTA & Travel Distribution Update for 2016 is below. It has been a quite week in the world of distribution. Here’s to a 2017 filled with much success and happiness. Happy New Year.

Loyalists More Likely to Use Airbnb [SHORT-TERM RENTALS]. According to a December 22 report issued by Morgan Stanley, hotel loyalty program members are the most frequent users of Airbnb. Apparently, this phenomenon remains true even if you consider the fact that Airbnb users are likely to be those that travel most frequently. Just imagine what might happen if Airbnb created an effective loyalty program . . .

Our weekly client OTA & Travel Distribution Update for the short week ending December 22, 2016 is below. This week’s update is brief one.

Long-Awaited Outcome to US Airways Suit Is Finally Here [GDS]. A federal jury found last week following an 8-week trial that Sabre had restrained trade by forcing unfavorable contract terms on its supplier, US Airways, and awarded US Airways $15 million in damages. At issue were the terms and conditions contained in Sabre’s GDS contract, including the contract’s “full content” provision that required US Airways to provide Sabre access to all of US Airways’ seats. 

This week’s OTA and Travel Distribution Update for the week ending December 16, 2016 is below. This week’s Update contains an update on one important recent court decision involving OTAs.

California Supreme Court Issues a Potentially Troubling Opinion [OTA / Tax]. Although I don’t often comment on the multitude of OTA tax decisions issued across the country, I felt that the recent California Supreme Court decision finding (once again) in favor of OTAs warranted some discussion. Although the California Court, like so many courts before it, based its decision on the rather uncontroversial conclusion that the OTAs were not “Operators” (the party expressly obligated to collect the occupancy tax under the applicable San Diego Municipal Code) of the subject hotels, language found elsewhere in the decision caught our attention.

November 2016 held more than one shock for many in America. Not only did the presidential election cycle come to a dramatic close, but the government introduced its new Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification.

First introduced in 1986, the “Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification,” must be completed for every new employee. Over time, it has been expanded from one page to two. And its instructions have grown from less than a page, to six pages for the 2013 edition to 15 pages of Instructions – more than four for the employee section alone – for the 2016 edition in English and in Spanish.

The future has arrived, and it has a strange sense of humor. Pokémon Go — an “augmented reality” game that requires players to travel to real world locations to capture imaginary monsters through apps on their mobile devices — is changing how millennials choose their travel destinations and hotels. These games have inspired a new generation of travelers, and present novel opportunities to businesses in the hospitality sector.

Our weekly client OTA & Travel Distribution Update for the week ending December 9, 2016 is below. Nothing too earth shattering this week, so we will keep things short . . .

Hello all,

With the new year, we plan to post portions of the OTA & Travel Distribution Updates that I prepare and circulate among our hospitality clients each week. Although the posts will be a week or two behind the initial client updates, we hope that the information will nevertheless be relevant to those of you working in the digital marketing / e-commerce / distribution world. We hope you enjoy and benefit from these new posts. Below is the weekly update ending December 2nd, 2016.

Happy Holidays everyone.

If you had asked me one month ago to predict the winner of the presidential election, I would have been wrong. Therefore, rather than make my own [ill-fated] predictions of the changes that await employers when PEOTUS takes office, I consulted my trusty Magic 8 Ball. Here’s what it predicted:

Will the overtime rule ever become law?     

MY SOURCES SAY NO.

We all have heard by now that the Department of Labor (DOL) rules extending eligibility for time-and-a-half overtime pay to some 4.2 million additional workers (including many employees in the hospitality industry) are on hold thanks to an injunction by a federal court judge in Texas. So what now?  The DOL under the Obama administration was expected to appeal the ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit, but the Trump administration has different priorities and may decide not to pursue an appeal after all.

On Tuesday, November 22nd, a United States District judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction that blocks the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) from implementing a controversial rule that would have expanded overtime protections from going into effect, at least for now. The pending regulations were scheduled to go into effect on December 1, 2016 and would have more than doubled the salary level required for employees classified as exempt under the “White Collar” exemptions. The Department of Labor estimated if the new regulations went in to effect more than 4 million workers would now be eligible for overtime. The salary level is currently $455 per week or $23,660 per year. The new regulations would have increased that amount to $913 per week or $47,476 per year.

When we last visited this topic, the proposed regulations revising the overtime exemptions were still very new. The regulations are due to go into effect on December 1 of this year. There has been legislation introduced to stop them from being implemented and court cases are pending. This article will remind you of the obligations, answer some additional questions that keep coming up and will bring you up to date on the efforts to stop the regulations from going into effect.