Photo shows hotel sign refusing to serve military personnel – Fact Check
A photo claims to show a sign the management at a hotel put up that stated they were no longer serving military personnel and their guests.
MOSTLY TRUE
An example of the photo as it appeared on social media can be seen below –
Saw this post from a Gold Star wife. (Marine) this sign at a double tree Hilton in Texas. Marines and Veterans make this go viral. SF
TLDR: The photo and sign are real, and was on display at a hotel in Colorado Springs for a short time during a gathering of military personnel and their families (not Texas as quoted in many examples of the photo.) It isn’t an official policy of DoubleTree or indeed that specific DoubleTree hotel, and two employees were fired as a result of the incident.
The photo is real, but as is common with viral posts such as this, much of the context is lost, and many facts have become blurred or lost in translation.
The sign is real, and according to the original social media posts that appeared on Facebook that contained the photo, it was erected temporarily at the DoubleTree Hotel in Colorado Springs.
Sponsored Content. Continued below...
According to witnesses, when the sign was shown, a number of military personal and their guests had gathered at the DoubleTree Hotel for a military ceremony known as a grog which was a tradition of the particular unit the attendees belonged to.
According to Aimee Osbourne, who originally published the photo to social media and who attended the event, no attendees engaged in bad behaviour and no damage was caused to the establishment.
The general manager at the DoubleTree Hotel in Colorado Springs later issued an apology via the hotel’s Facebook page and confirmed that two supervisor-level staff had been fired from the location as a result of the incident.
However subsequent social media rumours have called for a ban on all DoubleTree hotel establishments under the false belief that this is a company policy. This is clearly false, since it was not a company policy, and indeed not even a policy of the particular hotel in question.
Other false rumours have also incorrectly attributed the sign to being erected at a DoubleTree hotel in Texas, and this is also false.