Hotels provide essential temporary accommodation for travelers, displaced families, workers, people experiencing housing emergencies, and many others. In many legitimate circumstances, one person or organization may also need to pay for another person's stay.

Third-party hotel bookings should remain possible.

However, hotels and booking platforms should maintain safeguards ensuring that the person actually occupying a room is properly identified, knows about and accepts the arrangement, and can safely access assistance when necessary.

This is particularly important when hotel rooms are used for emergency housing, charitable assistance, temporary relocation, or other situations involving vulnerable people.

We call on lawmakers, hospitality regulators, hotel companies, and booking platforms to strengthen safeguards for third-party hotel reservations.

Reasonable standards should include:

• Requiring the actual guest's name to appear on the reservation.
• Verifying the identity of the person checking into the room.
• Clearly identifying when the person paying for a room is different from the person staying there.
• Using secure authorization procedures when a third party provides payment.
• Providing the guest with clear information about who arranged the stay and which expenses are covered.
• Maintaining appropriate records when organizations repeatedly arrange lodging for other people.
• Training hotel employees to recognize and appropriately report credible indicators of trafficking, coercion, exploitation, or abuse.
• Providing clear procedures for guests who believe a reservation was made without their consent or who feel unsafe.
• Protecting guest privacy and limiting unnecessary collection or disclosure of personal information.
• Ensuring that charitable organizations, families, employers, disaster-relief programs, and government agencies can continue arranging legitimate lodging for people who need it.

Third-party payment alone should not be treated as evidence of criminal activity or exploitation.

The goal is not to prevent someone from helping another person obtain shelter. It is to ensure that legitimate assistance remains possible while reducing opportunities for fraud, coercion, trafficking, and other abuse.

For people experiencing homelessness or housing instability, hotel stays can also provide important short-term emergency accommodation. They should not, however, become a substitute for broader efforts to create stable housing, effective shelter systems, and supportive services.

Helping someone obtain a safe place to stay should remain possible. Doing so should also come with reasonable safeguards for the person actually staying there.