Guests ejected mid-stay from bankrupt hotel chain Sonder
bbc.com
bbc.com
"A stay you can count on. Experience travel without the guesswork. While every space is unique, you can always count on the Sonder Standard. All stays feature designer details, keyless entry, fast free WiFi and our 24/7 digital concierge."
Trying to make a reservation returns "Your session timed out, but you can start a new hotel search below."
This badly hurts Mariott's brand. Their page reads as if they stand behind Sonder. Marriott supposedly has about 30 brands, and now you have to ask which of them are fake fronts.
[1] https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/nycho-the-merchant-hot...
A good unicorn will bring in XYZ billion[1] in profits and a bad one will bring in XYZ million in reputational damage.
Which is exactly why franchise operators get put through the wringer, while 'pod hotel but with an app' startups get the red carpet treatment.
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[1] Yes, I know that is bullshit, but I'm not an exec, I don't get paid to be wildly optimistic.
"Sorry, we can't find the page you requested.
You may have received this message because this page you seek is no longer available on Marriott website."
Not only does Marriott not own 95% of hotels with their brands, but in any given area, you can almost certainly find a competing Hilton/IHG/Choice/Hyatt brand.
It’s about as competitive as a market can get. What you probably are not aware of is a location where half or more hotels of the above brands are owned by the same people, and they franchise all the brands and choose all the prices. But even that is relatively rare.
My Hyatt and Marriott experiences sucked...
Unicorn status (1 billion) in 2020, to bankrupt in 2025. Another Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonder_(company) https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisdavidson/
No, they IPOed via a merger with SPAC in January 2022, and almost immediately the price of the company took a dip. 2021 was probably when the SPAC was founded/IPOed, and the relatively flat price prior to 2022 was because it was basically a pot of money.
Really amazing how much of a reliable indicator this has become.
Forbes 30 under 30 seems to be a bit more interesting for narcissists, as it really focuses on their "great achievements".
Probably can't stop search engines from indexing Forbes.com but still.
True story from silicon valley ( real one not HBO one)
If you haven’t heard of him, check him out in his podcast ‘Your Welcome’, spelling intentional.
Isn't this one of those pay-to-play accolades?
I encountered this recently.
The reception desk had a large portrait monitor with a person videoconferenced in from a remote location. You talked to the display. She walked you through scanning credit card using a reader installed below the screen and printing out room access code.
It was doable, but seemed like a strange dysfunctional future had arrived.
Then you pay them $50k or so per year, might even be for a married couple, and the kiosk helps them get sleep by avoiding interruptions overnight. But they’re still there in case of fire or police emergency to provide access and keys and whatnot.
The person on the kiosk is obviously in India/Colombia/Philippines/etc where labor is cheaper and they can handle multiple hotels at once.
Personally, I avoid those types of hotels, but don’t know if it will be as much of a choice in the future. I so like online checkin with Hilton’s app and using my phone as a key, so I rarely see the front desk anyway.
Since Covid, many budget hotels (think Premier Inn or Travelodge in the UK), have moved to an unstaffed kiosk model. Tap in your reservation number, confirm your name, take a blank keycard, tap it on the NFC writer, and away you go.
The restaurant / bar is still staffed, so they can help with any issues that arise, and there's live chat on their app/website. Does a staffed reception (whether in-person or remote) actually add much value?
They took away the one reason I had for maintaining my credit union membership.
You can't throw someone out of their home without notice because you have a business dispute with some third party.
...for leasing to a hotel chain that later went bankrupt?
>You can't throw someone out of their home without notice because you have a business dispute with some third party.
It's a hotel. Hotels typically have less tenant rights than long-term accommodations.
No, the story in the great-grandparent's post is not about a hotel, it's about a residential lease where:
1. They were paying rent to a property management company who managed a building's apartments.
2. The property management company stopped paying rent to the building owner.
3. The building owner had the police throw out every person living in those apartments with 0 day notice.
The person at fault is #2 - the property management company. That is who the building owner's dispute is with. It is criminal that the people who were thrown out onto the street with zero notice were the tenants who have up to this point upheld their end of the agreement.
The bar for getting thrown out of your home should be far higher than the bar for getting thrown out of your hotel room.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guide-to-the-rent...
> noun, the feeling one has on realizing that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles.
My feeling with Sonder is similar to that of my feeling with Airbnb: it’s fantastic for those longer trips where you want some extra amenities in the room like a kitchen. But, for general business or short-term travel, I just don’t get it. It no longer wins on price, and it loses by an order of magnitude on convenience. Why not just pick a hotel?
At least in Montreal, the Sonder offered a very nice location in the city (especially taking into account my office location) where there were very little chain hotels nearby. I saw it as a "more predictable AirBnB".
Bummer, I really liked being able to stay in that area.
I guess the company lived up to its name by reminding every guest that the company itself has(had?) a “life” as complex and eventfull as the guest’s own.
Sending an email to people saying you need to leave by noon seems crazy.
All goes well for a while but the techies start slipping on payments. First it's a few days, but sometimes they miss by a few weeks, so you schedule a call with the VP to straighten things out. Eventually they get a few months behind, you're fed up and demand immediate payment or you will stop lodging their guests (who have paid the techies, but somehow the money has not made it to you). CEO calls to straighten things out, promises to wire the money by Friday, just please please please don't evict any guests. You agree, but Friday comes and goes with crickets, and on Saturday morning you kick everyone out.
This will be an interesting case study to piece together. What were the factors that lead revenue to go down on expansion of your marketing and access reach?
I have my own suspicions, but the backstory with this is probably way crazier than I'm even thinking. Like, "Why would anyone ever sign that?" level crazy.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/cad/sonder/cash-on-hand/
It's agreement with Marriot was "completed" in August 2024. It was absolutely a hail mary.
While they might describe it as a integration failure, I think what they were actually hoping for was:
a) integration into Marriot's reservation system would reduce operating costs. From my user perspective, it looked like the Sonder system got completely replaced (like I had to make a new account and upload new ID...).
b) "Somehow" the Marriot integration would lead to increased bookings.
Both their 2025 and 2024 annual filings indicate that they were well aware of where things were going. Honestly, the filings don't really paint an optimistic picture of their ability to succeed, even with the Marriot deal.
I remember a case (maybe 30 years ago?) where a local health club chain went bankrupt, and anything anyone had left in their lockers was stuck there until the judge ruled on the case.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/03/28/Court-freezes-assets...
But your stuff in the gym's locker aren't the gym's "assets"? Same if you parked your car in some bankrupt hotel's parking lot. Just because it's on some bankrupt company's property, doesn't mean your car is up for grabs by creditors.
The only trouble is that the building probably does count as the gym's assets, so even though your stuff isn't technically frozen, you can't really go in to get your stuff. But if for whatever reason you could (eg. breaking in?), you'd be in the clear to grab your stuff.
A key component of bankrutcy is figuring out what belongs to whom. You say the stuff in your locker is yours. A credit may claim the company stored its idk staplers in a neighbouring locker. Usually, the gym would moderate that dispute. But given they're bankrupt, what you want to avoid is the creditor hiring a dude to empty out the locker of staplers into their storage locker opening your locker and doing that to it.
Marriott took the route of spreading out their brands. Sheraton, oh that's Marriott? I see. Westin? Huh. Le Méridien, never heard of … oh, Marriott.
Whereas Hilton seem proud enough to stick their name in a thing, even if it's a trailing '…by Hilton'. I wonder how this affects, say, bringing in a new brand.
'Sonder': anonymous. Never heard of it, until now. Gives Marriott some distance. Goes to hell? Cut it. How hard do you really need to try to onboard that brand?
'Sonder by Hilton': I know who owns that. I know which brand to blame when it goes to crap. Directly affects the core offering.
I just made up my mind whose scheme I'm joining.
You know what we do now? We get the Lonely Planet.
It turns out that living in a high trust environment is a lot better than living in a low trust environment, but if we're going to be living in a low trust environment, better to understand it than to pretend we can still act like it's still high trust.
What got LP flack has now spread to other guidebook publishers with little furor. I looked at a Rough Guide recently that had all the tell-tale signs that the publisher no longer considers fact-checking and quality control necessary steps. I do like a good guidebook, but in English that means only Bradt these days for its combination of abundant historical context and local knowledge, since so many of its guides are written by people who have been resident in the country for many years and often have an areal-studies background.
We guide ourselves around; that's not the sort of advice we're after. I didn't know this about LP though, and hadn't heard of Bradt. Next time that's what I need, I'll look them up.
Big in North Africa and generally around the Med. Ownership changed quite a few times, I didn't know it ended up in Marriott.
Reminds me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Ye8fBEkcc
I suspect the person assigned drew the short straw.
He was not kind to interviewers. Kind of like a pale, beshaded Charles Grodin.
I would be extremely surprised if hotels can just do this with no consequences, even if you somehow signed into it on their T&C.
Edit: Downvotes on this? Really? Hail corporate!
what consequences can you put on a bankrupt company?
I guess that guests might have claims for not used part of the stay but that’s going to be handled by bankruptcy process and there are rules who get money back in which order I guess employees get their paychecks first or something.
Same as what happens when a homeowner fails to pay their home insurance.
Don't worry, I happen to be knowledgeable about this.
Some key differences that come to mind (obviously YMMV):
Home insurance stops almost as soon as you stop paying vs. corporate insurance which is usually a bit more lenient and even has things like "tail coverage" in place.
The regulatory protections that apply to home insurance are very different to the ones applying to corporate insurance.
It's not uncommon for corporate insurance to cover events that happened while the company was insured, even if by the time the claim is filed the policy has been canceled.
Insurance is considered an asset of a company, and a judge can rule over what happens to them. This come into play particularly when bankruptcy is involved.
Many commercial insurance contracts, under some situations, cannot be canceled by the insurer, even if the company stops paying their premiums.
Anyway, I know on a naive approach it's easy to think that "all insurance is the same", but once you scratch a bit more than the surface of it you'll see it's a very complex affair!
Such an assumption is not necessary. (The difference between consumer and commercial insurance is also not germane when discussing a novel bonding scheme.)
If you’re getting thrown off by the home insurance analogy, think regulatory capital instead.
> regulatory protections that apply to home insurance are very different to the ones applying to corporate insurance
We’re discussing a hypothetical regulatory environment. Given the insurance is guaranteeing consumer protections, one would expect it to be strict.
If they can't afford it, they face prison time.
I bet that would fix the issue damn quickly.
Won't happen in this timeline, though.
For management? Not at all. It's almost just customary that employment agreements don't make employees, including senior managers, personally liable for their mistakes.
You'd just have to pay Board members and executives boatloads more. (Or, more accurately, they'd be able to justify more pay for the risk. And then go and purchase insurance to offload it anyway.)
I’m all for paying folks that legitimately have real power and responsibility, very well, but I would also hold them to rigorous standards.
For example, police. A cop having a bad day, can ruin your whole life. Pay the cop well, but also, ruin their life, if they abuse their power.
Again, we’re in the Dark Timeline, so that won’t happen.
You’d have a difficult time proving intent, nevertheless. The only practical solution is reducing the standard of proof, which is historically a straight line to hard oligarchy.
> A cop having a bad day, can ruin your whole life. Pay the cop well, but also, ruin their life, if they abuse their power
Cops deal in violence, which is far more black and white than e.g. being a hotelier.
That said, starting with cops is a good idea. Culture of responsibility and all that.
The idea being probably that not risking your entire personal wealth just to lead company would lead to more entrepreneurship, but it clearly ended up with small businesses (without legal or clear reason to make it LLC) not doing that cos of bureucracy, and everyone above abusing that construct wherever they can.
CEOs ballooning compensation would even be understandable in conditions where their biggest fuck up could get their private stuff seized but...
Personal financial liability would probably be more effective.
Force them sign a special type of insurance, or something else where other companies can temporarily pick up the pieces until the current stays are over. Make the company pay into a fund to pay for that before they get their license to operate the hotel, and make it a legal requirement that the fund needs to be able to cover all the currently active stays for N days. Consequences can be put on the people who run the company, that if they don't fulfill their legal duties they get fines or even prison.
Of course, this is just me brainstorming ideas in two minutes, I'm sure with a proper legal system and actual professionals they could work something out to protect guests and works better than "Sorry, we're bankrupt, you need to leave in one hour or sooner".
1. Secure creditors (like liens on specific assets)
2. Administrative expensive post bankruptcy
3. Priority unsecured claims like employee wages
4. General unsecured creditors like suppliers and customers
5. Shareholders
I think customers who paid by credit card or have travel insurance might be able to make a faster claim with those as the legal process is slow especially since it involves multiple countries where they do business.
You require a bond.
Are they really operating on such slim margins that it would have been a threat to their business/chains if they didn't immediately evict and re-book the room(s) out?
If you paid by credit card, just start a chargeback?
Chances are there are, but it varies by city.
> Edit: Downvotes on this?
Flagged. (Happy to unflag if edited.)
It was definitely surprising to see a backlash on that comment, though.
It also happens to be the comment with the deepest discussion, go figure.
Shameful. Given the choice between integrity and money, it seems they chose money.