TL;DR: Our Stay at the Sonder was far from perfect, and I wish it could’ve been handled better. Customer service and communication were practically non-existent, rooms were dirty, and listings were incorrect. I didn’t quite get the name of the girl that genuinely tried to help us at the front desk, but shoutout to you, you know who you are and we appreciate the empathy. That being said, if you can, stay anywhere else, especially for the prices we’ve seen for this place recently.

To start, we paid for a room with a QUEEN sized bed. My friend had arrived a few days prior to me, so we didn’t discover this until I got there, but we actually had a full, even verified by measuring. Obviously, this is not ideal for two people to share. But, I figured that this would be an easy fix; get a new room/another solution. But, Sonder’s response? “Can you just use the pull out bed?” Really? Not, “let me fix that for you?” Rough phone experience, front desk could also do nothing since “you booked through AirBNB” …uh.. okay I guess? The Front Desk also let me know they do NOT have full beds, so they have no idea how we have one, nor is a full bed an option on their Sonder app, all rooms show queen size beds, which is WHY we booked this in the first place.

After having to send screenshots to the sonder reservations email team (who seemed like they were the only ones able to do something), they finally took what I said as the truth after various threads of emails. They said the best they could do was to schedule half of my visit in the “correct sized bed room” and that there was no option available as of right now. Of course, not surprising. This, by far, was the most frustrating experience I’ve ever had with an AirBNB. They offered us a very minuscule credit for the issue, maybe enough to buy two coffees and a few bagels. I’ve never had issues in the past with any Host being so difficult to offer solutions to issues presented.

A representative guaranteed a 4pm checkout so we could switch rooms smoothly. The front desk never “approved” our late check out, so we went down to check: “Latest we can do is 2pm.” What? We literally had our room booked anyways for another two days if we weren’t getting a different room. They assured us our room would be the first to be cleaned to make sure there was no interruption to our day. Fast forward to 1:30pm, I get bombarded by who I am assuming is the manager who had a tone and asked “When are you planning on checking out?” I responded, “Well they said 2pm, but I’d like to stay until my room is ready. I work remotely and I have meetings to attend to.” Her solution was to use the lounge, and unfortunately our room would take “another hour” to clean.

Fine, we said. We’ll go ahead and use the lounge that has allegedly has wifi and we’ll work from there. We get to the lounge – No internet access, on every network available to us in the lounge. Thankfully, we have hotspots on our phone. On top of this, there was loud construction directly outside of the lounge, and the rooftop access was also closed at this time, so we didn’t really have many options. Turns out, our room was never prioritized for cleaning and was not available to check in until the normal 4pm check in time. So, essentially, my four day stay that I payed for turned into me not having a place to stay for a few hours, on top of being assigned a room we weren’t pleased with. There was no communication on Sonder’s part as to why this room wasn’t done or when it even was. During our time of waiting, we spoke to other guests who had very similar issues. I’m genuinely confused as to how this location has such a high rating overall.

When it came to the cleanliness of the rooms, there were marks on the walls, but that was about the only thing we could see that was obviously dirty. The floors didn’t look great, either. None of the switches worked in our room except for two, no idea what the other 4 did. The sink in the kitchen would take 10 minutes to drain, even if I barely used it to wash my hands. There was a weird stain in the shower of our switched room, but overall the cleanliness was a little bit higher there. This would be problematic if you were planning on cooking/washing things during your stay. I wish the reviews of this Sonder location were more realistic toward the reality of the location. I wish we would’ve stayed honestly anywhere else. It would’ve been a better experience had I felt we were genuinely being taken care of by the staff, but in reality it felt like these simple requests were pulling teeth for them.