Very cool, if true

Yeah, sounds about right. Arisia (the con I'm deeply involved with) got burned badly by this sort of thing a couple of years ago: there was a major hotel strike, and we thought we were within our rights to cancel because of it. In reality, Marriott's lawyers were bigger than our lawyers, and the resulting lawsuit nearly destroyed us. (In the end, I gather we were mostly saved by the fact that the hotel itself liked us and wanted to retain us as a customer, and helped restrain the corporate lawyers from taking all of our money.)

This time around, our team got in touch with the hotel early, and spent months negotiating the rules and date when we could declare "Yes, we're going online" publicly without penalty. The result was that we made the official announcement rather later than we might have liked, but it preserved good will with the hotel (which we do plan to continue using post-pandemic), and avoided another protracted and ugly suit.