When I was at the Congress Hotel in June, I ran into a couple who unwittingly booked a stay on the same day a worker strike there turned six years old.

A few yards below their room, the governor, state treasurer, several aldermen and union leaders from across the country staged a massive protest, shouting worker-solidarity chants into a megaphone.

It suffices to say that the couple didn't have the most peaceful stay. But if those folks come back to Chicago, they might be able to avoid a repeat experience.

Yesterday, the City Council's Finance Committee approved an ordinance that would require hotel operators to notify guests and third-party reservation services that there's a strike near the premises.

The vote was 16-3, a good sign for Ald. Ricardo Muñoz, who reintroduced the "Right to Know" ordinance this year after it failed to pass a few years ago. The ordinance has drawn critics who say it would help unions wield tourism as a weapon against hotels.

If the ordinance passes the full City Council, the onus would fall on hotel operators to make sure people know they're going to have to walk through a picket line to get into a hotel. The ordinance applies to any strike of more than 15 days, and it includes telling travel-booking services such as Orbitz.

"It is not onerous," Muñoz told me. "They do it already for a number of reservation policies. It's boilerplate."

He says warnings about the strike could appear near other legal language when customers book their travel.

Here's a catch: Even if the hotel operator tells that third-party service to include such a notice, and that third party fails to post it, the fault still falls on the hotel.

Is that fair?

"That's for a judge to figure out," he says.

Muñoz says it's no coincidence that the ordinance is moving forward about a week after union contracts with 30 hotels in the city expired.

"Obviously, this levels the playing field so that labor and management can talk from a position of strength," he says.

Unite Here represents about 6,000 workers whose contracts expired on Aug. 31. Annemarie Strassel, spokeswoman at the union, says it has made little progress in negotiations with hotel companies.

"You could say that in some instances, we've even gone backwards," Strassel told me, explaining that the hotels would like to charge more for health benefits, for example.

In the event of a strike, she says, the ordinance would "inform and protect" Chicago visitors from uncomfortable situations.

"A strike is really a last resort, but obviously, if there was a major disturbance in the city of Chicago, we would want guests to have some sense of that before they came."