There are some great things about this air b and b and some things that were not great for us.
Not great:
The listing DOES mention these two things but I am going to call them out because there were not great for us: first, the listing says that the unit may be slightly different than the unit pictured. As far as we know they own a bunch a units and they just show one in the picture which naturally is one of the best ones. I thought the variance they were listing meant like the chairs may be different but it turned out that there was not a wall between the bed area and the kitchen/living area as pictured. This was a problem for us because my husband was going to do some work while we were there and I wanted a wall between where he was working and our bedroom but our unit didn't have that. Looking at the map of the units, it seemed like we had the smallest unit on our floor so it might have just been our room that didn't have a wall but be prepared. If you rent here your room may or may not have a dividing wall so don't bank on that. Also, I haven't lived in a big city like Chicago so I was a little naive about the view we would have. The unit shown in the pictures of course has a great street view. Be prepared for this to NOT be your view. Maybe two units to four units on each floor will have a street view while the rest have a view of the building next door (aka a brick wall about 5 feet away). The windows are very large though so there is fantastic light, just not necessarily the view you expect. The second thing is that there is a cigar store on the second floor of the building. Again, they do disclose that. I missed it when we booked and even though we booked many months in advance and I contacted them 2 days after booking to ask if we could cancel because the smell of tobacco gives my husband headaches, they said no because we had exceeded the 24 hour period to cancel even though it was many months in advance. You could smell cigar smell in the lobby, elevator, and stairs but thankfully we could not smell it in our room on the 5th floor.
Another thing to be aware of, this place has a great location and is very near to the train BUT because it is so close to the train there is A LOT of train noise. So much so that if we were trying to watch a movie and the train came by we had to either pause the movie or put on subtitles. It is all hours of the day so if that will bother you while you sleep you need to be aware. It did not bother us and they did have an AC in the unit we were able to turn on for some more white noise. Also, you are in the busy downtown area so there will be street noise, honking, emergency vehicle sounds, etc. and there was also a construction crew erecting scaffolding next to the building from 10:30-12:30 one evening and it was very loud. I will say that the walls between the units seem very well constructed and we never noticed any noise from other units or the hallway which was very nice.
Also, the check-in process day of went really smoothly for us but the pre-check in process was SO ANNOYING. You have to create an account with sonder, then upload a picture of your driver's license and confirm your email and maybe one other thing. The thing that made this so annoying was that I was trying to take a picture of my ID on my phone and the site kept rejecting it no matter what I did. I contacted support (see the next paragraph for more about that) and was like your site is rejecting this what are my other options (I was hoping I'd be able to email a picture or something) and the support person pretty much told me too bad keep trying there is nothing else they would do to help me. The only reason I got it to work was I had to get a new phone anyway and once I got the new phone I was able to take a picture of the ID they approved. Also, from a different reviewer (I can't remember if it was this property or a different Sonder property) I read that if I hadn't done the approval stuff they wouldn't have sent the check-in instructions but they also would have still charged me (not sure what the official policy is there, just repeating what I read from someone else so take that with a grain of salt).
One thing that is good and bad, this is a company rental, not like some individual's property. So when it comes to communicating with them, you are communicating with a support team. I think that can be good because they are supposed to return your communications within an hour and there is some accountability for the person who is talking to you as well as options for what they can provide you, but because it is a company, they can only offer you specific things and have to follow rules and therefore are inflexible on other things. Examples: when the scaffolding crew were working past midnight we reached out to see if the company could like call to ask them to stop. they responded sometime later in the night and said they would send a white noise machine the next day. We were checking out the next day and the noise would be done by then anyway, so it wasn't exactly helpful but at least they tried. Also, the elevator broke