Chaos Breaks Out During New Year's At Tech Center Hotel

DENVER (CBS4) - The Marriot Tech Center hotel says it's refunding guests after a manfunction left them locked out of their rooms over the weekend.

Cellphone video obtained by CBS4 shows guests milling around in the hallways because their card keys would not work.

The keys stopped working sometime after midnight Saturday and hundreds waited for hours in the early morning hours Sunday hoping to get back into rooms. There had been a party at the hotel Saturday night with music and drinks that was billed as being one of the biggest in the city.

Some guests said there were multiple fights, and that the blood that could be seen in the lobby on Sunday was a result of one of them. Police responded to the hotel but no one was arrested. One person was taken to the hospital.

"Fights -- lots of fights. There was blood in the lobby," said Ty Cleveland, one of the guests who was locked out.

The hotel wrote a note to guests saying that its software crashed. Workers aren't yet sure if the switchover to a new calendar year had anything to do with it.

Several people who stayed at the hotel over the weekend told CBS4 there were several inappropriate efforts by angry guests to get in the rooms they paid for. Some people were eventually let into their rooms by security and some people simply opted to sleep on benches.

"From our bellhop this morning we heard that someone actually kicked down their door," guest Anita Moorhead said. "They kicked it off the hinges."

Fire alarms were going off at one point and for part of the night elevators weren't working. Some people chanted "Marriot Refund!"

"We were locked out, we couldn't get in," guest Leila Martin said. "People broke through the ceilings. There was drywall all over the place in the hallways. There were girls crying in the hallways."

"We tried to get into our room and could not," said Claude Moody, who spent several hours locked out of his room. "But one of our friends had a guest in the room next to him climb out the balcony on the atrium side and scale over to the other side, go in the room and open the door to let them in, so we hung out there for a while."

"It sucked. It was frustrating. They (hotel employees) were really nice about it. They were trying really hard to be accomodating but it was just a bad situation that no one could do anything about," Cleveland said.

Despite the many difficulties, many guests said most people just tried to have a good time.

"Everybody had had a few drinks at that point, so everyone just kind of had fun in the hallways," guest Dado Krnautivoch said.

Others said they are just happy the hotel is refunding their money.

"At that point in the night -- especially with people partying on New Year's, at that point all you want to do is go to sleep," Moorhead told CBS4.