The woman was on holiday in July 2010 when a uniformed electrician, an employee of the hotel in which she was staying, offered to guide her to reception.
Instead, he lured her into the engineering room and raped her.
The victim sued Kuoni in the High Court under the Package Travel Regulations and lost. A subsequent appeal was also lost, with judges ruling “holiday arrangements” did not include a member of the maintenance team guiding a guest to reception.
The Supreme Court has now overturned this verdict and ruled that the operator’s obligations “include not merely the provision of transport, accommodation and meals”.
The judges said guiding the client “from one part of the hotel to another clearly fell within the scope of the obligations undertaken by Kuoni under its package travel contract”.
They said the operator was liable under the PTRs and for breach of contract “because the services it undertook to provide were not provided with care and skill by an employee of the hotel which was a supplier of the services”.
Claire Mulligan, head of travel at law firm Kennedys, who represented Abta, an intervening party in the case, said:
“Today’s Supreme Court decision applied a broad interpretation as to what holiday services should be provided under a holiday contract and decided that guiding a guest did fall within Kuoni’s scope of a ‘holiday arrangement’.
“The assault was only able to take place, on this occasion, as a direct result of a hotel employee purporting to act as a guide. As such, the contract was breached. It also highlights that while employees of hotels are not in themselves service providers, the hotel itself is, and employees are within a hotel’s ‘sphere of control’.”
Mulligan said operators needed to review booking terms and conditions to ensure liability did not extend beyond the holiday arrangements they agreed to provide.
Risk assessments in hotels and resorts should also be carried out, she added.
TTG has approached Kuoni for comment.
