Horrible customer service. Nobody is ever at the front desk. The digital concierges on the app do not communicate with each other so when you have issues, you have to wait an excessive amount of time for something trivial (like 1 hour for a hairdryer). This is because their customer service is outsourced to the Philippines, there is a language barrier, time difference, and they do not properly communicate with the on-site staff who are never available.
We paid extra for early check-in but the room was still not ready when we came an hour later than we said we would. We were unable to check in until around 9pm because we were busy with UCLA graduation.
When we finally got into our room, it had a broken AC. It was 79 degrees. The hotel was booked up so they had to keep us in the room. They couldn’t figure out how to fix it so they gave us a dusty industrial fan which kicked up so much dust that my elderly mother had an allergic reaction. We had to turn off the fan and sleep in a room that was 79 degrees hot; needless to say, we both woke up sick with sore throats and headaches.
The next day, we were explaining this to the front desk attendant, a tall Black lady who first came across as pleasant. However, once I complained that the online concierge had only offered to refund us 75% of that night’s stay and that we should have 100% refunded, she had the audacity to say, “Well, it’s just the AC. There are other hotels in LA that don’t have AC.” Excuse me??? Do those hotels also charge $275 a night? I highly doubt it. Horrible experience. She also said she would move us to a new room that night and that we would have to switch to room 213 for the following day. She said she placed a hold on room 213 to ensure no one checked in over us.
The new room was fine. But the hairdryer was broken and it took an hour to get that resolved. During that hour, we used the app’s chat concierge twice and went downstairs ourselves twice. Nobody was at the front desk. What kind of hotel is this??
We woke up the next morning and went to UCLA again for graduation. We were out the whole day when I got a call from Sonder saying we had to move our belongings because check out was at 11am. I went off on the representative telling them about everything that had transpired so far. He was shocked and didn’t know what to say. I told him that if they touched my belongings, I would sue them because they did not have my consent to move anything. Nobody had said anything about what time we needed to leave the room by. Definitely not the rude Black lady the day before. To make sure they got the message, I texted their direct number and the app’s digital concierge with the same message to make sure they were aware of my threat to sue because these people do NOT talk to each other or make notes on accounts.
It gets worse. After spending an hour on the phone with someone in the Philippines named Shane (who was very understanding and empathetic, the only decent customer service experience I had this entire stay), she informed me that the rude Black lady had not reserved room 213 for us like she said she would. They were putting us back in the room with the broken AC. I went ballistic. I told Shane I could book another hotel outside of Sonder if she agreed to refund the full night. Shane agreed to put in the request. So I booked our final night in LA at the Westin and it was such a relief being there compared to Sonder that I cried in my hotel room.
However, then Shane texted me an hour later saying she couldn’t submit the refund. I reached out to someone else in the Philippines for customer service named Kim. Kim wasted another hour of my time by insisting that she could only refund me $200 for the last night (again, we paid $275 per night) if and only if we stayed at another Sonder location. I told her there was no way in hell I would do that after everything that had happened. She insisted that was the only way to get any money back so I said fine, book it. She puts me on hold for another 10 minutes and tells me all the Sonder locations are booked so there’s nothing she could do. I told her that’s exactly what Shane said and that’s why she offered the full refund for the last night. The Westin also had a no refund policy so now I had paid for another hotel because of Shane’s promise to refund me, you absolutely have to refund me. She refused again and said I had to get the refund through Airbnb.
Horrible horrible HORRIBLE. The desk attendant on my last day told me that all of their locations have major AC issues, and that it’s worse at other Sonder locations. Do not stay here.