FWIW I just reserved a room at the first Vegas hotel that Google served up (MGM Grand Las Vegas) and clicking through to the "Reservation Terms & Conditions" includes:

Room Status. MGM Grand reserves the right to check the status of all rooms/suites at any time.

which sounds like it covers these sorts of inspections

The vibe I'm picking up is that people are much more likely to book online than I realized.

Let me get this straight: you stay at a hotel, where you blindly agree that they can charge your card “to pay for damages” but you don’t sign anything that specifies what constitutes damage and what the charges may be for that damage? You’d be absolutely insane to do that - one scuff mark on the wall and you’re out $1000.

Or, more likely, you actually do enter into a more comprehensive agreement than you realise - perhaps during the booking process, or even implicitly by simply staying in the property.

> but you don’t sign anything that specifies what constitutes damage and what the charges may be for that damage

I neither said nor implied any such thing.

> you actually do enter into a more comprehensive agreement than you realise

Why would the agreement I entered into be something other than the one I read and signed?

> perhaps during the booking process

Booking is as simple as calling the hotel to reserve a room, then paying when I get there, usually with a couple pages of paperwork to read through. What part of that process sneaks a legally binding contract I've never read into the equation?

> implicitly by simply staying in the property

And implicitly by replying to my last comment you owe damages of $50.... That's not how contracts work. There might be some non-contractual reason why staff are allowed to enter, or else those hotels might have different paperwork from everywhere I've stayed (hence my question). Implied contracts are a thing, but they arise from ordinary social "contracts," not to grant special, previously unspecified, powers like goons rifling through your things. What's the legal theory that would give a hotel that much power, and if that power is real why would they stop at something as small as sending goons?

Walt Disney World, for one. But, all hotels reserve the right to perform safety inspections.

> WDW

Thanks for the answer! I asked because I'm legitimately curious which parts of the country/world use such draconian contracts. It's a new concept for me, and I know that my lived experience isn't a uniform, unbiased sample, so I'm especially interested in examples to the contrary.

> all hotels

Not in the slightest. The last ~50 hotels I've stayed at in the western half of the US haven't had anything so crude in their terms and conditions. I usually selected them by minimizing cost amongst hotels least likely to be lying about cigarette smoke and lock quality and greedily abandoning those who did lie. That does serve as a form of sampling bias, but it's not particularly selective, and regardless I'd expect that ~50x examples to the contrary suffice to demonstrate that "all" is a gross exaggeration.

Why wouldn’t hotels have the right to make sure you’re not running a meth lab in the room?

According to Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) Chapter 447, hotel operators are permitted to inspect rooms to ensure compliance with health and safety regulations. These inspections can be carried out to check for potential hazards, ensure cleanliness, or verify compliance with hotel policies.

There are similar laws in all major cities I chose to google - New York, San Francisco, Chicago.

I was (transitively) referring to somebody saying that you'd unintentionally signed your rights away, which in my mind is different from a law removing your rights. In one of these replies I explicitly acknowledged that regulations might still allow the hotel to be in the clear (not that you have to read everything I've ever written to add a comment here, just to say that we probably have more in common in our thoughts than it looks like you think).

Even then though, laws have limits. It's kind of like when a car wash has a sign tucked away absolving themselves of liability. At _best_, the sign serves as proof that you knew certain scenarios might not be safe and entered willingly, but if the car wash operator doesn't adequately keep rocks and grit out of their machinery then they can still easily be liable for scrapes and swirls to your car. The sign (giving them the benefit of the doubt) is to warn you of potential dangers (like that you should retract your antennae), and (assuming malice) is to persuade you that you don't have a case.

Going back to that law, how many times in the middle of each night can they verify you're not running a meth lab? Can they hold you hostage while they do the inspection? Can they unfold your underwear to ensure you're not hiding the meth lab there? Using something that broad as justification for rifling through a DEFCON attendee's things for something as commonplace as a USB has a decent chance of not holding up in court, even when the law seemingly allows it.

Mind you, that particular chapter you referenced says nothing of the sort. It gives health authorities the right to search the hotel, not for the hotel to preemptively do such searches on behalf of the health authorities.

> I asked because I'm legitimately curious which parts of the country/world use such draconian contracts.

Since you seem genuinely curious, I'll share some more background on this. The first thing to realize is that not all of your "agreement" with the hotel is necessarily in whatever's presented for you to read or click on at registration. They probably include various "Terms and Conditions" by reference which may not be physically presented to you or even a web click away but they are probably available somewhere on their website or by specific request.

The second factor is that much of the law governing your "contractual relationship" with the hotel is codified not in a contract or even in Ts & Cs but rather in state law and various regulations. Hotels (generally known as the 'hospitality industry') is a fairly highly regulated industry and since the idea of "Inns" pre-dates even medieval times, there's a fair bit which can be traced back to Ye Olde Common Law. Interestingly, in much of the law, the relationship between a hotel and guest is largely based on ancient landlord/tenant relationships, with certain necessary adaptations.

Within this complexity, various hotels assert slightly differing rights for themselves (whether they are "legal" or not is for a judge to decide (which often never happens)) and varying degrees of disclosure and, of course, state laws have some variance state to state, although the major points are mostly unified simply for practicality since most hotels and many customers operate across states.

The bottom line is that, whether or not it's been explicitly presented to you in print, on web click, available somewhere on the company's website or simply by vague reference to "other Ts & Cs" at reservation time or registration, it's probably true that most hotels in most states do have a limited right of inspection of their property which they've rented to you (upon reasonable notice, and within reason, etc) either under explicit or implied agreement or under state law, regulatory permit or simply state case law.

Finally, if you want to actively block such an inspection, hotel security is just going to call the cops to deal with you. Those cops aren't going to be lawyers or versed in all these details. They're just going to do what cops do, look at the situation and determine if the hotel is trying to do something that's obviously wildly unreasonable, and if not, since the hotel does actually own the property (and pays a lot of the taxes supporting the Vegas Metro PD), and since hotel security is just workaday joes following 'big company' national policy, and you're just some visitor who wasn't here last week and won't be here next week, they're going to try to get you to be reasonable, and if you don't comply, and the hotel security supervisor is pissed off at you (or his ex-wife that day) and decides to press the issue - they're just going to arrest you on some bullshit "disturbing", "disorderly" or "trespass" charge, (which the junior assistant DA will dismiss without comment after you spend a long night in jail). And it won't matter if you had an explicit agreement with the hotel or if everyone complied with that agreement at every step - because even if you see a judge, the charge won't even be related to that agreement, regulatory remit or state law. Funny fact: you can't even dispute the legality of a law unless you have standing, which usually means being charged under that law. I've actually intentionally tried to get arrested under a specifically unconstitutional city ordinance as part of a plan created by a constitutional lawyer to get in front of a judge and get the bogus ordinance nullified - and the damn cops figured it out and would not arrest me under that law - despite blatantly violating the law directly in front of the central police HQ - for hours - and repeatedly reporting myself.

BTW, I'm all for standing up to preserve whatever tattered shreds of our privacy and rights remain but I've also learned it doesn't help anything if you pick the wrong hill to die on. And, from just about every angle, this is not a "user winnable" fight to pick. They probably do have some right of reasonable and limited inspection. Your freedom here is the freedom to not stay there. If you are already there and really want to protest the inspection, just ask to see the security supervisor and manager on duty, tell them you're shocked and dismayed and tell them you'd like 15 minutes to privately pack your things and you'll leave (and expect a refund for the current and future days). For grins, you can even go for a full refund of the whole stay and if you're nice about it and come across as a reasonable person who legitimately feels wronged, you might even get it. Because ultimately you're dealing with workaday droids who just want the problem to go away. Low level employees following big company policy are roughly equivalent to vending machines executing firmware, and I try not to expend much energy arguing morals, ethics, law or politics with vending machines, or worse, performing the equivalent of a principled ritual seppuku just to make a point they'll never even comprehend. To make a difference, we gotta be smart and pick our battles wisely.