Press room

New class action settlement recovery opportunity is now available

CHLA is excited to announce that our partners at Class Action Capital have notified us of another class action settlement recovery opportunity which we believe is highly relevant to CHLA members.  As a reminder, Class Action Capital is a leading class action settlement management company and they are successfully working with a very large number of hotels across the country, including many CHLA members, helping to recover substantial refunds on their behalf from recent class action settlements. Class Action Capital operates on a contingency fee basis and specializes in the research, data collection, analysis and filing of complex class action settlement claims. 

Payment Card Interchange Fee Class Action Settlement
This settlement resolves allegations that VISA, MasterCard and their issuing banks violated the law by charging excessive interchange fees to merchants.  The settlement received final approval on December 13, 2019 and the settlement fund is approximately $5.54 billion.  Your organization is likely eligible for a refund if you accepted VISA or MasterCard branded credit or debit cards as a form of payment between January 1, 2004 – January 25, 2019. 

While no official claim form is available and claimants do not need to sign up with any third-party service in order to participate in monetary relief, many eligible companies choose to outsource the claims process to companies like Class Action Capital and avoid the responsibility of managing the process internally, such as deficiencies or audits, and the potential difficulty of understanding what data is provided by the defendants, how the data, or lack thereof, applies to your company’s claim, as well as what additional information can be provided to ensure a better positioned claim. 

The Class Administrator will have data from Defendants and others which it expects will permit it to estimate the total value of interchange fees attributable to each authorized claimant.  If the data is not reasonably available to estimate a class member’s Interchange Fees Paid or if the value established by the Class Administrator is disputed by the class member, claimants will be required to submit information in support of their claim. 

Class Action Capital can assist with this process by organizing the ways data is tracked by your organization and presenting that to the Class Administrator in a concise report to get an understanding of what matches.  If there is any discrepancy between the information the Class Administrator has and what your organization believes to be correct, Class Action Capital can establish an argument and negotiate with the Class Administrator on your behalf. 

This settlement is highly relevant to the hospitality industry and Class Action Capital has already identified many of the CHLA members as being very likely eligible to recover meaningful refunds.  Please keep in mind that you would not be entering into a lawsuit but submitting a confidential claim to recover your organization’s pro rata share of the settlement funds which have already been set aside into an escrow account. 

For more information, please visit www.classactioncapital.com/chla or contact Joshua Kerstein, Josh@classactioncapital.com or 914-200-0066, if you have any questions.