I never leave negative reviews. In fact, I would consider myself a very forgiving traveler when minor issues arise during an Airbnb stay because I have worked in customer service for many years and I understand that things happen. That being said, this was by far the worst Airbnb experience I've had and I've stayed in over 25 listings. This property management company (Sonder) was incredibly disorganized.
Our flight was delayed, so we didn't arrive at the listing until 12:30am. After a full day of traveling we were hoping to get into our room without any issues and take a shower. However, the access code we were given for the room did not work. The man at the front desk didn't have a clue so we called the Sonder Support number. It took 30 minutes to get through to an agent at Sonder and another 30 minutes to be placed in a different room because they were unable to reset the access code remotely that evening. Once we were finally in the room, we realized they had only given us one towel and there was no wifi network name or password to be found.
The second day, I was happy to see that we were refunded for the first night of our stay due to the troubles during check-in. They said they could get us into our new room at 12pm so after exploring the city for a few hours we came back to move our things into the room I had originally booked. To our disappointment, the elevators were down when we returned and yet again, the same man at the front desk was incredibly unhelpful. We sat in the lobby for 30 minutes along with other guests, waiting for the firemen to fix the elevators until one of the firemen asked the man at the front desk where the stairs were. When he propmptly led us to the staircase after waiting in the lobby for half an hour, we were shocked. We walked straight up to our original room to try the new code before moving our thing over and it worked. Then we proceeded to lug all our belongings up 6 flights of stairs, only to find the same code that worked 10 minutes prior did not work. We tried a few more times before calling Sonder support. We sat in the hallway outside of the room waiting on hold for 25 minutes before someone picked up and immediately hung up. Then I had to call AGAIN and wait another 25 minutes. In the meantime, I received a text saying that the code should be working now. So we tried again and it worked.
We were finally able to enter the room, but given our experience thus far, we were concerned that we would run into the same issue again when we returned later that night or throughout our stay. I asked the agent if they could confirm that the code would work for the remainder of our stay and their response was "Unfortunately, I can't really speak to that with confidence". Again, we were shocked. At that point, I had no confidence in this property management company whatsoever and we were anxious about not being able to enter the room again for the rest of our trip.
Fortunately, we had no further issues entering our room after the second day but we realized we were not given the wifi info for the second time around later that night when we attempted to watch a movie. Furthermore, the TV in the room is useless. It does not have channels, nor is it a smart TV. It's basically just a monitor. Unless you have the particular adapter to connect to your laptop, you won't be able to use it.
All in all, if the response time was faster and we had no issues entering our room, I would have given an entirely different rating. The original room itself was clean -- it looked like the photos, and the location was convenient for our stay. The bottom line is, being able to enter the room you paid for is a base level requirement for any stay and taking time out of our vacation to deal with these issues was simply unacceptable -- especially for the price.