Sonder bet on a Marriott lifeline — when Marriott cut it, guests were evicted mid-stay

Sonder was founded in Montreal as a premium, tech-run answer to Airbnb: leased apartments and hotels in more than forty cities, thousands of rooms, door codes instead of front desks. It raised about $680 million across nine funding rounds and went public in 2022 through a SPAC merger valued near $2 billion. The business had one structural feature that looked like a partnership and was actually a dependency — its bookings increasingly ran through Marriott.

The licensing deal, about a year old, put Sonder rooms on Marriott's platforms and into its Bonvoy reservation system. Sonder later said the technology alignment with Marriott's systems was substantially delayed, cost far more than planned, and drove a sharp decline in the revenue the partnership was supposed to bring. Over the weekend of 8–9 November 2025, Marriott terminated the agreement with immediate effect, citing Sonder's default.

On Monday 10 November Sonder announced it would wind down immediately and liquidate: Chapter 7 in the United States, insolvency proceedings elsewhere. Guests were emailed on the Sunday night and told to vacate as soon as possible; at staffless properties, door codes simply stopped working, and travellers were left carrying luggage through the streets looking for somewhere to sleep. Interim chief executive Janice Sears said liquidation was 'the only viable path forward'. A hotel chain whose reservation system belonged to someone else had no plan for the moment that someone left.

Marriott cut the bookings on a Sunday night; door codes stopped working and guests were evicted mid-stay, liquidating the $2B company in a day.

The distribution was rented: when a partner's platform carries the bookings, the partner's exit is your closure, on their notice period.

An integration that costs more than it returns is a second business with its own losses — Sonder ran a hotel company and a failing IT project at once.

A staffless operating model is efficient until the day it fails; with no front desk, there was also no one to tell the guests what had happened.

Never let a partner own the front door — if one counterparty controls the bookings, the technology and the customer relationship, your business is a feature they can switch off.