CHICAGO, October 14, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The Hyatt Hotel Corporation has followed the example of the Hilton hotel chain and stopped offering on-demand pornography in its 160,000 hotel rooms, according to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
The decision follows the August announcement by Hilton to drop all in-room porn channels.
“With this step, Hyatt is proving itself to be a leader among corporations that value a positive and safe environment for their consumers,” said Patrick Trueman, the group's president and CEO.
“By removing on-demand pornography, Hyatt is also taking a stand against prostitution and sex trafficking, which are crimes that often takes place in hotels,” he said. “Pornography not only increases the demand for prostitution and sex trafficking, but sex trafficking victims are also often used in, and trained how to perform sexually by pornography.”
The move allowed Hyatt to come off the group's “Dirty Dozen” list of corporations that aid the porn industry.
“NCOSE is grateful to Hyatt for its policy change and commitment to oppose sexual exploitation,” Trueman, the former Chief of the U.S. Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, said.
Hotels offering in-room porn have decreased dramatically, not because of opposition to porn, but due to changes in the marketplace. With Netflix and other streaming video services available without an additional cost, all hotel movie rentals had diminished – dropping by nearly half since 2007, according to PKF Consulting, an expert on the hotel industry.
Robert Habeeb, president and CEO of First Hospitality Group, estimated than a 200-room Holiday Inn could make $2,000 a month from in-room pornography rentals at one time – 80 percent of all on-demand video revenue.
Hyatt has not disclosed how much money it makes on the industry, but PKF Consulting told Crain's Chicago Business that all video rentals account for 0.2 percent of total hotel income.
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The Hyatt hotel chain is owned by the Pritzker family. The founders' daughter, Penny Pritzker, is a longtime Chicago ally of Barack and Michelle Obama. She presently serves as President Obama's Secretary of Commerce.
