why? would that make him a shithead? Surely it'd make the hotel a "shithead" or something?

The visitor that got bumped probably got a discount if he comes back in a week or two, or something.

You make a good point, which is that there might have been a discount offered or some other incentive, and the rescheduling might have been entirely voluntary on the part of the patrons. I'm not going to pass final judgment, since I clearly don't know the full story.

My observation is that many hotels aren't so kind about this sort of thing. I was once on the receiving end (sort of) of a similar situation, in Juneau, AK. It's a small city with a short tourism window, so it tends to be packed in the summer. Some rich piece of shit called up one of the major hotels and asked for half of it so he could throw a party. Patrons were booted, regardless of reservations. I wasn't in that hotel, so I wasn't directly booted, but it affected the entire city, because it was impossible to get a hotel due to all the displaced people. My girlfriend and I ended up staying in a "historic" ex-brothel hotel in a room right over a nightclub.