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Apology after scandalJewish guest rejected! Hotel scandal surrounding a booking request
The Central Council of Jews is calling for a legal investigation after the incident.
picture alliance / CHROMORANGE / Christian Ohde
A hotel operator in Bavaria cancels a booking. He then receives death threats and the booking platform removes his hotel from the site. Because his cancellation had nothing to do with overbooking or bad planning.
A hotel in Bavaria rejected a booking from Israel on anti-Semitic grounds. The Israeli Consul General for Southern Germany, Talya Lador, strongly condemned the hotel's behavior on Platform X. As a result, they responded to the booking request in English: “Sorry, no Jews are allowed in our hotel.” The Hotel “Zum Hirschen” in Lam in the Upper Palatinate has since apologized to the guest via email and invited them to a free vacation.
“That is not our world view at all,” said junior boss Andreas Vogl when asked. “It was definitely wrong for us to respond in the chat in this way,” the hotel wrote to the guest in an email that was also sent to the Bavarian State Chancellery. In it, the operators of the family hotel explain how the statement came about. Accordingly, the hotel has been struggling for a long time with fake bookings and phishing attempts via a large booking platform, from which user data is said to have been stolen.
The request from Israel was also wrongly assumed to be a fake. “It is really extremely important to us that you understand that this statement was not made with people of Jewish faith in mind, but rather out of anger about the numerous fake bookings,” the letter says. “Nevertheless, this was unacceptable and should not happen in a professional company.”
In the email, the hotel invited the guest and his family to the Upper Palatinate for a week free of charge “to get to know us personally and to prove to you that we are not bad people who discriminate against others.” According to Vogl, the hotel has been receiving threats and death threats every day since then. The hotel also removed the booking platform from the platform. “This is a huge problem,” said Vogl. However, he does not assume that anything will change despite the clarification.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany is calling for a legal investigation after the anti-Semitic statement. “The inhumane statement 'no Jews allowed' can in no way be justified, regardless of the attempt to contextualize it,” said Central Council President Josef Schuster. “My expectation is that this incident will be examined for its criminal consequences.”
Sources used: plus/dpa
