TL,DR: Room flooded, would not recommend until infrastructure improvements are made.
Review: This "hotel" appears to be a former apartment building that was purchased and remodeled into a hotel. During our stay, we were placed in an English basement style room (partially, but not fully underground). Our first night went smoothly - the automatic locks on the building door and room doors made getting into our room very easy. However, our positive experience ended there.
Our room was flooded during our stay. Water soaked through the ground into the carpet, which soaked all of our bags and most of our clothes (which were on the ground because there was no closet, no dresser, no space at all for luggage. This room is incredibly small, and calling the bed a queen would be generous. In fact, the restroom is so small that when sitting on the toilet, your knees need to be underneath the sink.).
While flooding is obviously unacceptable, what made our stay even worse was the difficulty of resolving the situation. My expectation for any hotel would be that we would be moved to a new room within the hour and our stay would be comped. Instead, we struggled to get assistance for over two hours. Sonder does not retain any staff on site, so we were forced to call corporate and navigate their automated phone system go get assistance with our stay. Even once we were connected to an actual person, we were (either purposely or accidentally) disconnected from our call twice before we finally decided to book a new hotel.
To their credit, once we were able to keep Sonder representatives on the line long enough to resolve the issue, they had opened up a room on the fifth floor for us to stay in. However, by that time it was too late, we had already moved to a new hotel (and honestly, we were unconvinced that this new room wouldn't have similar concerns).
I appreciate that not everything is under Sonder's control, but building safety is a major concern, and I have to think that this building must not be up to code if a pretty standard DC rain caused our room to flood. It should also be noted that Sonder did send us $100 to dry clean our clothes, which was much appreciated and in my opinion goes a long way to restore Sonder's reputation. However, I still believe this issue should have been resolved much faster via on-site personnel.
Lastly, I am still trying to recoup a full refund from Sonder/Air BnB for our stay. Air BnB has refunded the days we were forced to leave but insists that their policy is to charge us for our first night in the room since we did stay there. To me this seems unacceptable. After discovering that not only our room was flooded, but also the hallway on our floor, it seems very likely to me that we were exposed to potentially harmful conditions during the night that we did stay there, and I ultimately expect that they will recognize that fact and give us a full refund.
If you made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read the full review! Here's hoping that Sonder is able to rectify their building issues and provide a more exemplary stay in the future.
Cheers,
Brian