Say that you arrive at a hotel where you have a firm reservation — maybe even prepaid — only to have the desk clerk tell you the hotel is full and can’t honor your reservation. This can happen for several reasons, generally because the hotel overbooked, some guests stayed longer than expected, or somebody bought out the whole hotel for an event. Something has to give: A hotel can’t quickly build another room for you to occupy, and it can’t throw a current guest out. The “why” doesn’t matter; the hotel is simply unable to honor your reservation. What you need to know is how the hotel plans to fix the problem and what rights you have if it doesn’t find an acceptable fix.
As far as I can tell, at least in most of the country, you have no specific right, as you do with an overbooked airline flight. Normal industry practice is to try to fix the problem:
