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Home > College of Business > ICHRIE Research Reports > 11 > Iss. 6 (2026)

 

Author ORCID Identifier

Mahboubeh Cheraghian, https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5958-7051

Saeed Vayghan, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5063-6486

Mehmet Erdem, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2934-9401

Executive Summary

In the global response to human trafficking, the hospitality industry occupies a crucial but understudied role. A 2018 Polaris survivor survey, based on a self-selected sample rather than a representative prevalence study, found that approximately three out of four respondents had interacted with a hotel at some point during their exploitation. The core challenge is that no single property accumulates sufficient information to act independently. Traffickers deliberately rotate guests across three or four properties within a week, and privacy regulations including the GDPR and CCPA, together with the duty hotels owe their guests, make it unlawful for properties to compare booking records. The data required to identify trafficking patterns exists, but it remains confined within institutional silos that cannot lawfully be consolidated. This paper introduces HAVEN (Hospitality Anti-trafficking Vigilance and Early-warning Network), a conceptual framework that enables independent hotels to learn collectively from booking patterns without any guest record leaving the property. Although HAVEN draws on privacy-preserving artificial intelligence methods, its central argument is directed at the hospitality field: privacy and protection are not opposing values, and with the right design they can be built together. We describe the framework, present a proof of concept across twelve simulated hotels, and discuss implications for hotel operators, smaller and independent properties, tourism policy, and future research. All results reported use synthetic data; real-world validation is the next step and will require ethical review and hotel partners. The work aligns with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on gender equality, decent work, and the protection of children.

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