Unless there's illness or staff shortages, or some other reason the hotel can't function over Christmas, it makes no sense to cancel 14 rooms at short notice with no hope of re-booking them at short notice. 14 rooms is a lot of rooms. I can't see any hotelier deliberately throwing away business like that. I think there's more to this than meets the eye.
It says quite clearly that the booking was cancelled because of damage done by the same group to another hotel last year. Presumably the booking was accepted in good faith and they were later appraised as to the problems the previous year, so they decided to cancel it.
Before I condemn the hotel out of hand, I would like to know more about what happened at the other hotel.