Juan Ávalos Méndez was three days into a 12-day trip to Amsterdam when, on Monday, he woke to find a letter had been slipped under his door: The hotel was closing and he needed to check out by 11 a.m.
Staff at the front desk would be available to answer questions and help make further arrangements, the letter added. That did not turn out to be true, Ávalos Méndez said.
He was staying at a hotel run by Sonder, a company that managed short-term rentals and boutique hotels in 40 cities around the world. The company had a meteoric rise: In 2019 Sonder was valued at more than $1 billion and considered a competitor to Airbnb. Sonder went public in 2022 but struggled to become profitable. In 2024, the company signed a licensing deal with Marriott International and rebranded as Sonder by Marriott Bonvoy.
Marriott announced the end of that agreement on Sunday, saying that Sonder had defaulted on its agreement. Guests, like Ávalos Méndez, were informed overnight that their stays had been terminated. In a statement Monday, a day after its collapse, Sonder announced it was “winding down operations” and would file for bankruptcy.
“When you’re not profitable, at some point, you run out of cash,” said Nicolas Graf, a professor at New York University’s Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality. “And that’s what happened in the past few weeks.”
It’s unclear how many guests were affected, but many took to Reddit forums and other social media sites to complain about the abrupt end to their vacations as well as about canceled upcoming holiday plans.
Unlike Airbnb, where individual owners list the properties they own for rent, Sonder leased its short-term rentals directly, which made it highly leveraged, Graf said. In the early years, this model was fairly successful, but then the business began to grow too fast with an eye to going public, he said. Once Sonder went public, the company was in a race for growth.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and the company never appeared to fully recover.
“What unfolded over the following few years was far worse than anything we’d seen in historical data, or ever imagined was possible,” Francis Davidson, Sonder’s co-founder and former CEO, wrote in a LinkedIn post in June.
The deal with Marriott was announced in August 2024 and allowed Sonder to market its inventory on Marriott websites and made Sonder properties available through the Marriott Bonvoy rewards program.
But, according to Sonder’s statement, the two companies struggled to align their booking systems along with other integration issues, resulting in a “sharp decline in revenue.”
“We are devastated to reach a point where a liquidation is the only viable path forward,” Janice Sears, Sonder’s interim CEO, said in a statement.
In a statement, Marriott International said that its “immediate priority is supporting guests currently staying at Sonder properties and those with upcoming reservations.” But on the ground, guests said they were left in the lurch with minimal communication. Sonder’s app directed guests to an 800 number that when called said it was not in service.
Joan Lee, 42, whose four-night stay after Christmas at an apartment in Rome was canceled Sunday night, said that Marriott did not offer “any real solution.” While her trip was refunded, comparable stays were now twice the cost of what she had booked through Sonder, and Marriott did not offer any credit or discount to bring down that price, she said. When she called Sonder, she received an automated response in Italian, she said.
“It was disappointing,” Lee said. “My husband is already a little iffy on Airbnbs, and so what we liked about this was that it had the Marriott brand attached to it.”
When Cole Ramsey, 47, and his husband went to check in to their Sonder hotel in Miami on Sunday afternoon, the key code they were given during a virtual check-in process would not open the door. A hotel staff member let them in with a key, Ramsey said.
Once inside, he received an email notification that Sonder’s deal with Marriott had ended and that his reservation could not be honored. Afraid to be locked out if they were to leave, they holed up in the room until the time came to check out the next morning. Ramsey had only a one-night stay booked before a cruise on Monday, he said.
“I was basically trapped and like a prisoner in my room, because I was afraid if we left, we would never get back in,” he said.