Pool Floods Hotel Rooms, Resulting in Lawsuit

The Loews Chicago Hotel is a property located in a high-rise that offers 400 luxury guest rooms and 25 suites. Prices for a standard room regularly hover around $140 a night, and the hotel gets excellent reviews of 4 and a half stars with Tripadvisor and other sites.

As is pretty common for hign-rise buildings in big cities, the Loews Chicago Hotel doesn’t occupy all the floors. There are 50 total floors in the building with apartments on some of the higher floors. Floor 15 even happens to to include a swimming pool for the apartments.

In mid-2015, the swimming pool was accidentally overfilled to the point at which it overflowed out of the pool, over to the walls, and flooded the hotel below. The damage was enough so that guests were inconvenienced, and I’m figuring that the water dripped down into some of the suites so much that they had to move people.

I’ve had water leaks a few times at hotels, but have never stayed at the Loews and haven’t had the experience of staying in a room right below a swimming pool. I’d imagine that this situation where a swimming pool overflows is relatively rare, and even rarer that it happens at a property where the pool is situated above the guest rooms.

I’m figuring that the water must have been running for several hours before it was obvious what the issue was, and by then it was too late.

Then by the time they knew what was going on, the water had to be stopped and then the damage had to be surveyed. They would have immediately moved any guests affected, and seeing as the issue was in warmer summer months the hotel might have been quite full, and it is possible they had to re-accommodate guests at other properties depending on how many rooms were flooded.

Loews has filed a lawsuit, alleging that an employee of the apartment property management firm walked away while filling the pool. Loews is seeking damages over $50,000.