‘We Were Completely Blindsided By This’: Woman books dream NYC hotel stay, then discovers something that ruins everything 3 weeks before her trip

People trying to travel for the holidays are running into problems this year. A government shutdown caused flights to get canceled and made airport lines really long. Now hotel guests are having trouble too. Some people who booked rooms through other companies are finding out their reservations got canceled out of nowhere.

According to Bro Bible, a TikTok user named Katie Newton posted about how her New York City trip got messed up. She booked a room at a Marriott hotel using a company called Sonder. But then she found out her booking wasn’t good anymore because Marriott and Sonder stopped working together.

Newton made a video that more than 385,000 people have watched. In it, she talks about how she and her friends only had three weeks to figure out where to stay now. She said she was worried the whole trip would be ruined and they might have to call everything off. People in the comments told her that hotels in New York still had rooms, but they cost way more money than usual during the holidays.

This whole situation sounds like a complete mess

Sonder said on November 10, 2025, that it was closing down and going through Chapter 7 liquidation. The company also said that Marriott had ended their deal the day before that.

So everyone who booked a Marriott room through Sonder suddenly didn’t have a place to stay anymore. Hotel stays have been facing various challenges lately, and now this problem is making things even worse for people trying to travel.

Sonder is giving people their money back. But getting a refund doesn’t really help much when you need to find a new hotel fast or when all the other hotels cost a lot more. Sonder gave customers a phone number they could call to get help, but the number didn’t even work when people tried it.

Looking at posts on the Marriott subreddit on Reddit shows that lots of people are going through the same thing as Newton. One person said they got told to leave right away during the busy season in New York when hotel prices were really high.

They had paid for a two month stay at a good price but got kicked out halfway through. Someone else said they got kicked out while they were already staying there and couldn’t even go back to their room that night.

People in the comments gave tips and talked about how angry they were. One person said affected travelers should “check to see if your credit card has any insurance relating distrupted travel plans. Some may compensate you for lodging/transportation etc. so might be worth a shot.” Another person said it was “absolutely unacceptable from Marriott” and thought “this could end up being a class action lawsuit eventually.”

They told people that when talking to customer service, they should “demand that they don’t refund the remaining stay and instead follow the process for what happens when someone is ‘walked.’ That means THEY are the ones to find you alternative lodging as well as compensation.” The mess with refunds and trying to get help is a lot like other customer service situations where companies have left people in the dark.