A guest's lost suitcase and the Hotel Proprietors Act 1956

A guest leaves, then telephones from the motorway: the camera bag is gone from the bedroom. Or a bicycle disappears from the porch. Somewhere in the back of most owners' minds is a memory of a framed notice in a hotel lobby, limiting what the hotel owes for a guest's property, and a comfortable assumption that the same limit applies to them. It very probably does not, and the reason is the first section of a short Act from 1956.

What the Act means by a hotel

Every element of that definition is a hurdle for a self-catering let, and the decisive one is "without special contract". A holiday booking is a special contract: named guest, fixed dates, agreed price, terms accepted at the point of booking. The definition describes an establishment that must take the traveller who walks up to the door. A cottage let by the week to whoever booked it in March is not holding itself out that way. Add the reference to food and drink, and the ordinary self-catering property sits well outside the description.

The conditions inside section 2, for completeness

Where a property is a hotel, the section is tightly drawn, and the conditions are as interesting as the figures.

• The limits apply only where, at the time of the loss or damage, sleeping accommodation at the hotel had been engaged for the traveller. A visitor who came for lunch is in a different position from a guest with a room.
• They apply only where a copy of the notice set out in the Schedule to the Act, printed in plain type, was conspicuously displayed in a place where it could conveniently be read. The protection is conditional on the notice, and an unread notice in a drawer is not displayed.
• The section does not cover any vehicle or any property left in it, or any horse or other live animal or its harness or other equipment. A car break-in on the drive is outside this section entirely.

What actually protects an owner

• Insurance that names guests' property, read for its own limits and exclusions. This is where a real ceiling comes from.
• A lockable safe or cupboard, and a written record of anything a guest hands over. Once you accept custody of something, you have accepted a duty about it.
• A clear route for a guest complaint that does not start with a solicitor, and a note of where a dispute would go if it could not be settled directly.

Two honest limits on this article. We have not decided whether any particular property is a hotel within section 1; that is a question of fact about how the place is held out, and a mixed operation with meals and walk-in bookings could be argued either way. And the figures in the Act are the figures the Act still carries as read: fifty pounds per article, one hundred pounds in the aggregate. We have not found and are not asserting any later uprating of them. If they look strikingly small for a modern suitcase, that is precisely the point of not relying on a cap you probably cannot claim. We study every request and tell you honestly whether and how we can help.