A DoubleTree hotel in Colorado Springs is apologizing after a sign was posted at the hotel’s bar refusing service to “military personnel and their guests” during a military event.
Aimee Osbourne posted a picture of the sign on social media – and it went viral.
“I have people on one side [saying] boycott them and people on the other being like ‘boycott them’ and I have people on the other side saying ‘you’re a liar,” Osbourne said. “I think as so many of us do, we’re just like ‘oh, I’m going to tell my friends that I had a negative customer experience, so that’s what I thought I was doing. I promise you 100% when I wrote that post at 830 in the morning, nowhere in my mind did I think ‘oh, I’m going to be sitting at a fox news studio talking to somebody about that dumb post I made.”
Osbourne said Double Tree reached out to apologize within 30 minutes of the post being up.
“I mean, they couldn’t have gotten on it any faster. When they reached out to me I said what do you want me to do? I am out of my depths here.”
DoubleTree released a statement Friday, saying in part:
“The actions of the employees staffing the event do not align with the values of our management or brand. It’s unfortunate that assumptions have been made about what happened that evening. We regret any offense to the service members and their guests. The employees involved have been terminated, and we have taken action to require additional training for all current employees to ensure they treat all guests with the utmost respect.”
“I believe their apology. I have believed their apology since the beginning,” Osbourne said. “In all of this DoubleTree has done an amazing job to apologize to say this is not our core values, this is who we are. And they have a long-standing history of supporting the military and taking care of the military…And we appreciate that and that wasn’t what this was about. This was about a bad customer experience.”
The post has since been deleted.
