The handling and protection of personal attendee information is an increasingly worrisome issue for meeting planners. Now, though, the stakes are being raised as some hotels are putting into meeting contracts clauses that allow them to disseminate data on attendees to whomever they choose.
Such a clause was posted recently on MiForum, the electronic meetings community found on www. MiMegasite.com. The posting was from an association planner in California perplexed by what he saw in a contract: The hotel reserved the right to disseminate his group members' information to third parties "for any lawful, business purpose." Moreover, the provision stated that the hotel would be indemnified from any liabilities resulting from the use of the group's and attendees' information.
Not all contract clauses addressing the dissemination of attendee data are so aggressive. Other hotels are including language that allows them only to provide information upon request by the federal government, which in some cases has requested information on hotels' guests for national security purposes.
The above planner addressed the clause with the property, which, acknowledging that the provision had been questioned by other planners, revised the clause for the planner. But "I [still] think the language was broad enough that it would allow the hotel to sell the information to third parties," says the planner.
Kelly Bagnall, an attorney with Dallas-based Brown McCarroll LLP, who works with hotel management companies and hotel owners, says she has been seeing varying degrees of related contract language recently, but notes that the indemnity clause is uncommon. "I don't see release information—language absolving a party from legal binding—very often in contracts; the level of indemnity varies from hotel to hotel," Bagnall says. "But with third parties having an ever-increasing role in organizing events, there's going to be a need for data disclosure."
Many organizations, particularly financial and pharmaceutical ones, put strict data confidentiality clauses in their contracts, and hotels can be equally diligent, according to Bagnall. "Most times, hotels are adding contractual language in response to what they're seeing in groups' contract addendums." But Washington, D.C.-based meetings consultant Joan Eisenstodt expects that planners will encounter more such data-usage clauses. "Unless you don't have a credit card or use a phone, none of us really has any privacy anymore."