Marriott International Inc. is suing a franchisee hotel in Jamaica, Queens, for $2.6 million, claiming that the hotel broke their agreement by turning into a sanctuary for migrants.
According to a federal court lawsuit, Pride Hotel was scheduled to debut to the public in November of last year under Marriott’s low-cost Aloft and Element hotel brands. However, the lawsuit contends that the hotel started to function as a migrant shelter instead.
The owners of Pride Hotel – an eighteen-story structure with 283 rooms – are also accused of breaching their contract by failing to pay franchise fees and removing Marriott logo and signage. They have been identified in the complaint as Jai Patel, Krishna Mehta, Chandra Mehta, Jagruti Patel, and Vipul Patel – all of whom live in New York.
According to the complaint, Pride Hotel’s lawyers sent Marriott a letter in August of last year proposing a different arrangement that would have let the facility to be utilized for migrant lodging. The hotel’s operations, they claimed, were not “economically feasible” because of “the poor state of the economy and continued slowdown in the hospitality industry.”
Since 2022, the Big Apple has housed over 210,000 migrants in a patchwork of more than 200 emergency shelter locations. According to the New York Times, more than one in five hotels in New York City are currently shelters, driving up room rates to all-time highs. Numerous Marriott hotels, including one in Jamaica, have also been converted into sanctuaries for migrants.
