[1] Prior to being a Ramada hotel, it was a Forte Hotels-managed property that was branded as the Travelodge New York JFK.

[8] For several years, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), the airport's owner, leased the building and site to the hotel-holding company Westmont Hospitality Group.

[11] A series of nearby airplane-crash incidents, the flights of which originated at the airport [6] in the 1990s and 2000s, caused the hotel to be casually referred to as the "heartbreak hotel" when the facilities would be used as the temporary central housing and gathering place for family members of passengers and crew, as well as the media.

[12][13] The crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 originated the use of the hotel facilities for guest housing, bereavement-related services and news gathering for crash-incident-related purposes.

[14] Ying Chan, Jose Lambiet and Jere Hester of the Daily News wrote that for the families the hotel became "a makeshift grief counseling center".