Legal Question in Personal Injury in California

Re: Hotel negligence & premise liability

Probably not, though I might see things differently if I had more information.

Premises liability generally does not apply to harm caused by the intentional actions of a third party, as happened here. Instead, in order to prevail you would probably have to show that the hotel was negligent.

The fact that this happened does not prove negligence. Negligence is defined as the breach of a legal duty the defendant owes to the plaintiff, combined with resulting damages. Since the hotel may not have been able to prevent your tires from being slashed, you might lose even if it breached its duty of care -- which I don't think it did.

The hotel owed you a duty of reasonable care toward your car while it is on their premises, unless you waived this duty. For the sake of simplicity I will assume you didn't. Reasonable care would require the hotel to make sure its trees don't fall on guests' cars, that its employees don't accidently scratch them, etc., but it probably would not require the hotel to actively intervene when a stranger with a knife is slashing your tires. Insisting on such heroics seems pretty unreasonable to me.

Another way you could win is if the hotel had guaranteed your car's safety, or acted in such a way as to reasonably make you believe it offered such assurances. Few hotels guarantee that their guests' cars will be protected while on their premises. The fact that this hotel had a security guard doesn't create liability where there otherwise would have been none; if it did, businesses would have a strong incentive not to provide security at all.

If my tires are slashed while my car is in your driveway, should you be liable? Unless you're the one who slashed them I'm sure you would say no -- even if you had a security system in place. The same logic applies here.

The person who slashed your tires is responsible. Maybe if this sort of thing had been going on for awhile and the hotel hadn't taken reasonable steps to stop it you could hold it liable -- or maybe if the guard's dueites included intervening when someone vandalizes a guest's car. Otherwise I don't think you have much of a case.