Tanethia Holden v. Holiday Inn Club Vacations Incorporated, No. 22-11014 (11th Cir. 2024)
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Two consumers, Tanethia Holden and Mark Mayer, entered into separate purchase agreements for timeshares with Holiday Inn Club Vacations Inc. Both stopped making monthly payments and considered their agreements to be canceled. However, Holiday disagreed and reported their debts to Experian, a consumer reporting agency. After unsuccessful attempts to resolve their disputes with Holiday, both Holden and Mayer filed individual actions under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), alleging that Holiday inaccurately reported that they owed debts and failed to reasonably investigate their disputes.
The District Courts granted summary judgment for Holiday in both cases, finding the alleged inaccuracies were legal disputes and therefore not actionable under the FCRA. The courts reasoned that a plaintiff asserting a claim against a furnisher for failure to conduct a reasonable investigation cannot prevail on the claim without demonstrating that had the furnisher conducted a reasonable investigation, the result would have been different; i.e., that the furnisher would have discovered that the information it reported was inaccurate or incomplete.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the lower courts' decisions, but for a different reason. The court held that whether the alleged inaccuracy is factual or legal is beside the point. Instead, what matters is whether the alleged inaccuracy was objectively and readily verifiable. In this case, it was not. Thus, Mayer and Holden had no actionable FCRA claims. The court declined to impose a bright-line rule that only purely factual or transcription errors are actionable under the FCRA. Instead, it held that in determining whether a claimed inaccuracy is potentially actionable under the FCRA, a court must determine whether the information in dispute is 'objectively and readily verifiable.'
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