Travelers using the platform Sonder to book rooms in serviced apartments and boutique hotels say they were unceremoniously kicked to the curb over the weekend, after the once highly-valued travel company suddenly saw its partnership with hotel heavyweight Marriott come to an end.
On Sunday, Marriott announced that its licensing agreement for Sonder to use its Marriott Bonvoy reservation system, little over a year old, was over.
On the ground, this meant travelers across the world suddenly had to leave their rooms mid-stay.
“I’m a traveling clinical transplant coordinator on assignment,” Threads user Damien Jay wrote on Sunday. “Today I got an email telling me to vacate my paid room by 9AM Monday because your licensing agreement ended — with NO relocation, NO compensation, NO support.”
“I booked in good faith, paid in full, and I’m mid-assignment handling life-and-death organ recovery cases,” he added. “This disruption isn’t just inconvenient — it’s dangerous.”
For others such as Steve McGraw, a retired tech executive staying at a Sonder property in New York City with his family, the shake-up meant steep costs finding a new place to stay.
“We ended up spending several thousand dollars more to find a new place,” McGraw told Business Insider. “It was very, very disruptive. They treated us so poorly.”
Other Sonder customers said they returned to their rooms to find their luggage packed, or found staff members at the properties in question seemingly unaware of the status of the Marriott-Sonder blow-up.
Patrick M. D’Aoust of Ottawa said he got an email on Sunday giving him until Monday morning to vacate a Montréal stay he booked for an anniversary trip, only to immediately be sent packing.
“I asked the staff if we could still stay until our checkout at 11 am, but the staff explained he had only received instructions to empty the building ASAP and that unfortunately we only had 10 to 15 minutes,” he told CNN.
Travel vlogger @reece.traveling said the chaos had left him “basically homeless” for a time.
The Independent has contacted Marriott and Sonder for comment.
Marriott has said it will support customers seeking refunds on pre-paid Sonder reservations.
Sonder, which reportedly operated 140 properties and nearly 8,000 apartments at its peak, announced Monday it was “winding down operations immediately” and expects to initiate a Chapter 7 liquidation of its U.S. business, while entering insolvency proceedings in its foreign markets.
In a statement, the company, which struggled to become profitable after going public in 2022 and weathering the pandemic, pinned some of the blame on its Marriott deal.
“We are devastated to reach a point where a liquidation is the only viable path forward,” Janice Sears, Interim Chief Executive Officer, wrote. “Unfortunately, our integration with Marriott International was substantially delayed due to unexpected challenges in aligning our technology frameworks, resulting in significant, unanticipated integration costs, as well as a sharp decline in revenue arising from Sonder’s participation in Marriott’s Bonvoy reservation system.”
The company was once seen as a major threat to Airbnb, and in 2019 it raised $225 million at a valuation north of $1 billion.
Unlike Airbnb, however, the company leased its short-term rentals directly rather than relying on properties that hosts already owned.
“When you’re not profitable, at some point, you run out of cash,” Nicolas Graf, a professor at New York University’s Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality, told The New York Times after the company announced its Chapter 7 plans. “And that’s what happened in the past few weeks.”
