Not an employer but British Airways did this. The flight was cancelled at the last minute as we sat at the gate and 300 people had to go into airport hotels overnight. There weren't the rooms available for everybody to have their own place (at least not for the Y pax, probably F/C were treated differently.
Being amost entirely British nobody was upset as they could see it was the best approach to the situation.
Some years ago used to work for a major US-based IT company. We had a married couple in the office who, whenever major conventions etc were booked centrally by corporate, had the reverse problem, namely no end of difficulty getting into the same room, there was always some snafu with this. In the end they normally just checked one of them in, the other just went in with them and their own reservation was unused, it was the easiest thing. There was on at least one occasion an intra-accounting department argument about handling their expenses for this, that just went on and on, as although they worked in the same physical office they were in different departments and different cost centres.