Hotels are notorious for age discrimination, specifically in their policies regarding minimum age to book a room. Many hotels do not set the minimum age cutoff at 18 like most businesses do, and instead have booking age cutoffs at 20 – 21 years old, with some even going as high as 25 years old! This is blatant age discrimination against youth and young adults, as they are prevented from accessing services by a business, based on nothing but their age—an immutable factor. However, there is one specific hotel booking age policy that I want to focus on in this article, which is even more unreasonable than just a normal higher minimum booking age. Midtown West Hotel, in New York City, doesn’t just have a high booking age, it mandates that any guest under 21 must have a parent’s consent to check in, via a Parental Consent form at the front desk. If the young adult is unable to acquire their parent or guardian’s consent to stay at the hotel, check in is not allowed and the payment for the room is not refunded.
Table of Contents
- The Fundamental Flaws in Midtown West Hotel’s Parental Consent Policy
- How this Hotel Policy Prevents Orphaned Young Adults and Former Foster Youth From Booking a Room
- The Safety Risks of Hotel Minimum Age Policies
- The National Youth Rights Association
The Fundamental Flaws in Midtown West Hotel’s Parental Consent Policy
This regulation is innately ridiculous, and for several reasons. Most of the time, hotels’ high booking age policies are justified by their view that young people are irresponsible and less likely to pay for damages that they cause. Because of this, they usually require guests under 21 (or whatever their minimum booking age is), to be accompanied by another adult, who assumes the responsibility for any damage caused. Now, this is an inherently discriminatory and stereotypical view of young adults, however, at least that reasoning is based in logic. Midtown West Hotel’s policy isn’t about liability for damages. If it was, then they would use a different type of policy like other hotels use, where any older adult can assume the liability and damages caused by the young adult.
Other hotels treat their discriminatory age policies much differently, such as one that uses a separate third‑party authorization and waiver form which includes a clause that if the guest is under 21, the guarantor/parent/guardian assumes financial responsibility for room and incidentals/damages. One independent beachfront hotel policy states that you must be 21+ to reserve, and guests 21 – 24 not traveling with a parent/guardian must pay a refundable cash security deposit per person. While these policies are both discriminatory against youth, and shouldn’t exist in the first place, their logic is clear: young people are treated as a liability, so therefore someone else should be responsible for their damages. Midtown West Hotel’s regulation is completely different, and instead focuses on the aspect of requiring parental consent to stay at the hotel. This policy isn’t about liability, it’s about parental control over young people, and forcing young adults who are trying to be independent, to still have to rely on their parents to access adult privileges.
In normal circumstances with higher booking ages, a guest under 21 who’s traveling with anyone over 21 would be able to get a room just fine, so long as the room is in the name of the older adult. So if a group of friends are traveling with each other, some of the friends being 20 years old, while some of them are 21 or older, the 21 year olds would have to book the room. With this hotel, however, the young adults under 21 are forced to only be allowed to travel with their parents in order to book a room at the hotel. Since the policy is specifically a “parental consent form”, and not another type of waiver that any adult can sign, any young adult not traveling with their parents or legal guardians would be stuck without a way to book a room. This limits the autonomy and freedom of movement of young individuals who simply want to book a hotel room in New York City.
This hotel policy enforces a corrupt ideology, that young people should be bound to their parents, in order to have access to privileges in society. This is effectively tying the rights and privileges of young adults to their parents, which is incredibly disrespectful and discriminatory, especially to young people who may not be on good terms with their parents. There can be multiple reasons that a young adult is not on speaking terms with their parents. Sometimes parents are unreasonably strict, controlling and overbearing, which leads a young adult to want to be free from their control as soon as they legally are able to. In more severe instances, if a parent was abusive to a child growing up, they’re obviously going to want to have as little contact with them as possible, once they become an adult. So imagine the shock they would get when they find out that they would have to get their parents’ consent in order to exercise independent traveling, while still being an adult.
Parental Consent forms should simply not exist once someone becomes an adult. The place of parental consent forms was places like elementary school, where you need to have your parents agree to let you go on a field trip for school—not for a grown adult to check into their hotel room while traveling. Rights and privileges of young people should not be tied to their parents, and young adults should never be forced by a company policy to rely on their parents. Young people deserve freedom of movement, and independence over their life decisions, including travel.
How this Hotel Policy Prevents Orphaned Young Adults and Former Foster Youth From Booking a Room
One of the major reasons why this regulation is ridiculous, is the fact that it prevents young adults with circumstances regarding their parents completely out of their control, from being able to book a room. One of the biggest flaws in this hotel’s policy is that it prevents orphaned young adults from being able to book a room. The wording of the policy specifically states that the young adult must obtain parental consent—meaning a parent or legal guardian—not any other adult, and has to fill out the form. But there are completely reasonable situations in some people’s lives, where they don’t even have a parent or legal guardian. Let’s say, hypothetically, that when a young adult is 18 years old, both of their parents tragically die in a car accident. If the young adult was still a minor, they would get a new legal guardian assigned to them, or enter the Foster Care system. But once someone is 18 years old, or older, they are considered an adult, and this process no longer applies to them. This doesn’t just go for New York; this goes for any other state in the US (with the exception of Alabama, which has an age of majority of 19 years old). Because of this, orphaned young adults do not have a parent or legal guardian.
So if an orphaned young adult under 21, whose parents both lost their lives sometime after the young adult turned 18, attempted to book a room at this hotel, they would be literally incapable of attaining parental consent to check in—and therefore, be completely barred from staying at the hotel. This means that orphaned young adults are functionally prevented from booking a room at West Midtown Hotel.
Along with this, young adults who lost their parents—or their parents lost custody of them—sometime while they were still minors, face the same problem. According to New York’s foster care system (and similarly for other states), once a minor in foster care turns 18, they have aged out of the system and are no longer in the government’s custody. Some exceptions apply, such as if the young adult entered an extended foster care system, but this is uncommon. Therefore, young adults who have aged out of the foster care system also do not have a legal parent or guardian. Once again, this means that any former foster care child, who is now over 18 but under 21, is functionally barred from booking a room at this hotel, since they are incapable of acquiring a parent or legal guardian’s consent for them to check in.
Putting this into perspective, it’s clear how this regulation doesn’t actually take the context of anyone’s situation into consideration. Imagine planning a trip to New York, and once you arrive at your hotel, you’re told that you need your dead parent’s consent in order to check in—there’s no other word to describe this policy than insane. Of course, someone in that situation could always try to explain their circumstances to the front desk. But that begs the question, would the hotel listen? Would they make an exception to their age policy based on the context of an individual’s experiences? Well, to answer that, there are a few similar stories we can look at.
In a hotel-industry subreddit, r/talesfromthefrontdesk, users often discuss age restriction policies with hotels. One particular comment discusses a disturbing instance of an 18 year old in the military being denied access to a hotel since the minimum booking age was 21 years old. Even after he informed the hotel employee “I’m falling asleep at the wheel, I have to be at my duty station by 7am, I just need a few hours.”, he was still denied. This story illustrates a real instance of young people being extremely inconvenienced and facing a safety risk due to discriminatory policies of hotels. Along with this, it shows that even in dire circumstances—where a young person’s safety is on the line—the hotel refuses to make an exception to their age policy.
Looking at this instance, it’s reasonable to assume that the same logic would occur if an orphaned young adult attempts to reason with the hotel to avoid the parental consent form at check-in. And even if the hotel was willing to make an exception for someone whose dead parents couldn’t sign a consent form—that shouldn’t have to be something that young adult travelers worry about in the first place. You shouldn’t have to break down into a sob story, talking about the death of your parents or experience in the foster care system, in order to check into the room at a hotel you paid for. Age—and parental consent—should simply never be considered as a requirement for someone to book a room with a hotel.
The Safety Risks of Hotel Minimum Age Policies
The entire root of any hotel minimum age policy is inherently unreasonable because of who they target. The hotel policies specifically discriminate against young adults who are traveling without their parents/guardians, or other older adults. Young adults who are doing this type of independent traveling with no other adults present, are likely to be extremely independent. Young adults who have more independence are also more likely to be more responsible, and therefore less likely to cause liability issues for the hotel. Along with this, young adults traveling independently obviously have access to their own money—enough to be doing the traveling in the first place. So the hotel doesn’t need to worry about them not paying. However, they still institute policies forcing young adults to pay “younger adult” surcharges.
Age discriminatory hotel policies also pose safety risks to young adults. In an instance mentioned by Jerome Adams, his 20 year old son was driving on a road trip from Indiana to Florida, and yet couldn’t find a hotel anywhere due to his age. This forces him to either have to continue driving through the night (which puts him at a safety risk due to being tired impairing his driving), or pulling over somewhere and sleeping in his vehicle, which imposes various other safety risks. His safety was severely threatened by the fact he was denied a hotel room because of his age.
And long, dangerous road trips aren’t the only safety issue posed by hotel minimum booking age policies. While some hotels allow 18 year olds to book rooms independently, no hotel allows minors to be able to book a room on their own. This opens up even greater safety risks—especially for minors in dangerous situations who are fleeing abusive homes.
One of the main reasons why minors run away from home is due to facing abuse and domestic violence within the home. For youth homelessness and family violence, a toolkit from the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence summarizes research indicating that a primary cause of youth homelessness is family dysfunction including physical/sexual abuse and family violence—reporting substantial shares of runaway youth describing violence by caretakers. Youth in these situations, who have been forced to run away from home due to an emergency, are possibly the most vulnerable people being out on the streets without a place to stay. This is why minors should have access to being able to book a hotel room independently of their parents—because of these situations where they need emergency shelter.
Unfortunately, other laws make it even more difficult for homeless youth to find a safe place. Many states have extremely strict runaway laws, which both charge young people with status offenses for leaving home without a parent’s consent, AND charge anyone who they run to stay with, with a crime if they do not report the young person as a runaway. Because of this, youth fleeing abusive situations have to make a choice… they either can run away to a home that they do feel safe in, and risk either being reported as a runaway and being forced to return to their home. Or, they take to the streets. This is where runaway rights tie directly back to hotel booking age discrimination. Because if runaway youth do not feel safe going to another home, and also do not have the ability to independently book a hotel room, then they literally have no choice but to stay on the streets.
For a lot of situations where runaway youth are fleeing abuse, many people will argue that the best solution for them is to report the abuse to the police or Child Protective Services. And while this can be helpful in many circumstances, it is not always a perfect solution. There have been many reported instances of Child Protective Services failing to intervene to protect children from abusive homes—either never getting involved and never removing the child from the home—or temporarily intervening then returning the child to the abusive home. In these instances, the child then faced either severe injury—or death—at the hands of their parents.
In an instance described by NYRA volunteer Bailey McCoy, she and her siblings were living in a toxic home environment in which their parents engaged in drug use and domestic violence often. The domestic violence situations became so worrisome that her siblings would all hide in one room, often crying in fear because of it. Bailey described that on more than one occasion, she left home during her parents’ domestic violence outbursts and went to a stranger’s house to tell them to call the police. Once the police arrived, all they did was talk to the parents, and then left Bailey to return to them. This happened multiple times, even after several of Bailey’s suicide attempts had been reported, with some leaving her hospitalized.
This showcases just how the system can be set up against vulnerable youth, which gives them an extremely valid reason to run away from home without informing the police or CPS. Children escaping abusive homes shouldn’t be prevented from having a place to stay, just due to their age. And hotel age policies refusing to give minors access to booking a room, is directly exposing them to the violence of being out on the street with no safe place to turn to.
This brings me back to my original point of focusing on the parental consent policy of Midtown West Hotel. In Bailey’s circumstance, after multiple failures of police and CPS to intervene, she was eventually taken into the foster care system. She is now 18, meaning she doesn’t have a legal guardian anymore. So if she were to travel to New York, and attempt to book a room at this hotel—who would be able to sign the parental consent form for her? That’s right, nobody. She would be punished by a hotel’s discriminatory policy for the crime of, what? Being abused? Having to escape a toxic living environment? The way that this hotel literally punishes young adults for not being able to acquire their parent’s consent is heinous and completely ignores the context of any individual’s life experiences.
All in all, young adults should never have to rely on their parents for adult rights and privileges—and businesses should not force them to do so. Hotel minimum age limits are discriminatory, wrong and don’t just inconvenience youth, but expose them to unsafe situations including long tiring road trip hours and the inability to seek shelter in the event of escaping an abusive home. But one hotel policy shines as being the most ridiculous, unnecessary and discriminatory of all. Midtown West Hotel’s “Parental Consent” form as a requirement for check in literally bars orphaned young adults and former foster youth from being able to check into their hotel rooms. These policies should not exist, and should be abolished.
The National Youth Rights Association
If you’re interested in Youth Rights, consider volunteering with us. We are always looking for new members and would love to have you on board. If you have a personal story to share, about being denied a hotel room due to your age, or about a general youth rights violation, consider sending us an email at nyra@youthrights.org. We’d love to help get your story out to the world.
The text of Orphaned Young Adults are NOT ALLOWED to Book a Room at this Hotel © 2026 by Zane “Xillion” Miller is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
