No. 21-1410

DEBORAH LAUFER,

Plaintiff, Appellant,

v.

ACHESON HOTELS, LLC,

Defendant, Appellee.

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MAINE

[Hon. George Z. Singal, U.S. District Judge]

Before

Kayatta, Howard, and Thompson, Circuit Judges.

Thomas B. Bacon, with whom Thomas B. Bacon, P.A. was on brief, for appellant. Sally A. Morris, with whom Jennifer H. Rohde and Sally A. Morris, Attorney at Law, LLC, were on brief, for appellee.

October 5, 2022 THOMPSON, Circuit Judge. We're asked today to weigh in for the first time on an Article III standing question that has divided the circuit courts. Certain regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") require places of public lodging to make information about the hotel's accessibility available on any reservation portal to those with disabilities. In the age of websites, that means a disabled person can comb the web looking for non-compliant websites, even if she has no plans whatsoever to actually book a room at the hotel. Thus, the information could be viewed as irrelevant to her -- except to whether the website is complying with the law. Has she suffered a concrete and particularized injury in fact to have standing to sue in federal court? Contrary to the district court's thinking, we think the answer is yes.1 We further conclude that Laufer has standing to pursue injunctive relief and that the case is not moot. So we reverse.

1 By our count of the precedential opinions, three of our sibling circuit courts have said no, and one has said yes. See Laufer v. Arpan LLC, 29 F.4th 1268, 1273-74 (11th Cir. 2022) (standing); Harty v. W. Point Realty, Inc., 28 F.4th 435, 444 (2d Cir. 2022) (no standing); Laufer v. Looper, 22 F.4th 871, 879–81, 883 (10th Cir. 2022) (same); Laufer v. Mann Hosp. L.L.C., 996 F.3d 269, 273 (5th Cir. 2021) (same). One other has said no in a non- precedential judgment without analysis. See Laufer v. Alamac Inc., No. 21-7056, 2021 WL 4765435, at *1 (D.C. Cir. Sept. 10, 2021).

- 2 - I.

A.

Deborah Laufer is disabled. She can't walk more than a few steps without assistance and instead uses a wheelchair or a cane to move around. She also has limited use of her hands and is vision impaired. Among other requirements to accommodate her disabilities, she needs special accessible parking and has to use passageways wide enough and properly graded for her wheelchair. Certain surfaces also need to be lowered so she can reach them, pipes under a sink need to be wrapped so she doesn't scrape her legs on them, and bathrooms need grab bars so she can transfer from her wheelchair.

Defendant Acheson Hotels, LLC, operates The Coast Village Inn and Cottages in a small town on Maine's southern coast. It accepts reservations for the Inn on its own and other travel- related websites. When Laufer first visited Acheson's website, she found that it didn't identify accessible rooms, didn't provide an option for booking an accessible room, and didn't give her sufficient information to determine whether the rooms and features of the Inn were accessible to her. She also says she faced the same dearth of information when she visited the Inn's reservation service through thirteen other third-party websites, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, and Booking.com. And she alleges that

- 3 - she plans to revisit these websites "[i]n the near future" to see if they still lack th