How hotels manage this situation, would, I think, be at the discretion of the hotel. I have known hotels that will offer reduced rates if you turn up on the night and they have unsold rooms. The hotel had a policy in place, and set the prices that the rooms would go for - while it may have come across as the employee doing it, they were only acting in accord with what the procedure allowed.

Perhaps at the hotel in question here, they had some mechanism for doing it in the past, but it has been removed.