A DoubleTree hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado, fired multiple employees and issued an apology after the hotel displayed a sign refusing service to members of the military and their guests who had been attending a post-deployment celebration held at the hotel.
“Two Supervisor-level employees, who have since been terminated, made poor decisions including displaying a sign that they created, which we find very offensive,” Daniel Kammerer, the hotel branch’s general manager, said in a statement posted to the hotel’s Facebook page. “Their actions were in no way associated with the values of the hotel management.”
“We deeply regret any offense to the service members and their guests, and have implemented a retraining of our employees to ensure this does not happen again,” he added.
Multiple Facebook users shared a photo of the sign posted at the hotel bar last week, which read, “NO LONGER SERVING MILITARY PERSONNEL & THEIR GUEST(S).”
One Facebook user, Justin Vames, said in his post that 600 people attended the post-deployment ceremony at the Colorado hotel, adding that hotel employees would not leave food out for guests and treated them “like crap.”
Vames’ Facebook post about the incident went viral, being shared more than 28,000 times as of Sunday afternoon.
KOAA reported that the woman who initially posted the photo online, Aimee Osbourne, took the image down because of the negative comments on the post.
Osbourne, a disabled veteran who has a husband serving in the military, said that she accepted DoubleTree’s apology.