Xjyuk

I'm going to be changing some identifying details here.

Alice attends Omega University. OU has a policy which restricts guests' access to dorms to only certain hours on certain days. The day in question is from 3pm until midnight.

Alice arrives with her guest Arthur around 7pm, when they are told that Arthur must leave because of an event for which OU has suspended the hours. The email informing Alice of his was sent at 5 pm.

Arthur now threatens to sue OU in a small claims court for travel costs, arguing that if OU had notified their students in a timely manner, he would not have expended resources travelling to the university.

Ultimately, Arthur decided not to sue.

If the lawsuit had gone forward, how likely would it have been that Arthur won?

Jurisdiction is USA. I am not willing to provide the state because the above events are true with identifying information changed. If a state is required for an answer, pick your favorite.

Arthur has no contractual relationship with OU, and therefore no right to be in any dorm, or anywhere w.r.t. the university. The university has no duty to Arthur. Alice has some relationship to the university, but that doesn't matter here. This is similar to the situation where you drive to a store to get a chunk of cheese (assume that the store has a website) and find that the store is closed for some reason, or find that they are out of cheese. You can't sue the store for the expense of driving to the store and finding your goal thwarted. They have no legal obligation to third parties to inform them in a timely fashion of closures or product-outages.

Given Alice's contractual relationship to OU, it is imaginable that the university makes a promise regarding advance notification about unscheduled changes in hours, for example, they might promise that students will receive an email pertaining to closures within 1 hour of the closure decision being made. There is zero chance that there is such a clause, which is stated in terms of something uncontrollable (receipt, not transmission, of email), and is an unrealistic time frame given the nature of OU bureaucracy (they would not willingly set themselves up like that). Furthermore, Alice suffered no financial loss. Alice also won't have a financial loss because Arthur sued Alice – Alice has in no way wronged Arthur.