The Marriott Casa Monica Hotel in St. Augustine is run by unpatriotic jerks

This is a case of Marketing Fail, that will echo for some time.  The Marriott affiliated Casa Monica Hotel fired an employee for wearing an American flag pin:

Sean May, 26, a front desk supervisor at the hotel, told WJXT TV-4 in on Thursday that his boss told him to remove his lapel pin or go home. He went home.

May is now fighting the policy. [May has since been fired - Borepatch]

St. Johns County Commissioner Mark Miner, a sergeant in the Florida National Guard, criticized the hotel's management.

"The Casa Monica Hotel and Kessler Enterprises certainly have the legal right to forbid their employees from wearing an American flag pin," Miner said in a written statement Friday. "However, their inability to discern between the flag of our nation and other pins and buttons their policies forbid is of great concern to me."

I agree with Sgt. Miner.  The hotel (and Marriott) have every right to set their own employee standards and policies.  No question.

And I have every right to think that they are unpatriotic jerks who will never see me at their property.  And to recommend the same to anyone who will care to listen.

As someone who has been in the vicinity of the Marketing Department for some time, let me just say that this is enormously damaging for both the hotel and for Marriott (note: the hotel is independently owned but is a Marriott franchisee).  This story will reach a bunch of people, in a high impact manner.  It would have been much less damaging for the Hotel to let employees wear any old badge they wanted.

And guys like me are angry enough to do things like choose a highly specific blog post title for this post.  Google pays more attention to metadata (things like post titles) that regular data (the body text), and so if this moves up in the Google rankings, there's at least a chance that anyone who searches for the hotel name will find this.

And quite frankly, they should find this.  Perhaps they won't really care.  But if they do, they may choose a different hotel, and that would serve the unpatriotic jerks who own the Casa Monica Hotel with a bit of poetic justice.  They'll also learn something about Marriott corporation, too.  What they choose to do with that is up to them.

Remember marketeers: Google sees all, forgets nothing. 

And let me leave an open invitation to the marketing folks at the Casa Monica and at Marriott: if you want to reply here (in the unlikely even that you even find this post), you have an open invitation.  I will post your statement unedited.  I may snark on it, so if you bring me drivel, please make it high caliber drivel.