TravelAI Acquires Troubled Sonder Brand
Repositions as“Curated Guide”
By Jordan Bradley
TravelAI announced the acquisition of Sonder on July 27, marking a new chapter for the brand as an AI-enabled, curated travel guide featuring boutique hotels and apartment-style accommodations.
Sonder, a former short-term rental firm that operated design-forward boutique hotel and apartment-style accommodations in major cities around the world, made headlines last November when Marriott International terminated its licensing agreement due to Sonder’s insolvency.
The dissolution of the licensing agreement with Marriott sealed Sonder’s fate, at least for the time, leading the company to file for bankruptcy.
Following the November shuttering of Sonder’s operating business, hospitality companies, including Apart-hotel company Kasa, took over some of Sonder’s properties.
While the new acquisition deal from TravelAI relaunches the Sonder website—and includes Sonder’s trademarks, domain names, and intellectual property—it does not resurrect the once-bankrupt company’s operating business.
“The acquisition is limited to Sonder’s brand and intellectual property: TravelAI did not acquire Sonder’s operating business, including its properties, leases, inventory, or staff,” TravelAI said in the late-July announcement.
Now, sonder.com will operate “as a curated guide to the world’s best urban stays, and as a flagship consumer brand built on the memory infrastructure TravelAI is building for the travel industry,” the announcement said.
Sonder was founded in Montreal in 2014 as the Canadian answer to Airbnb. TravelAI representatives say that the brand earned global name recognition, and has garnered more than 50 global trademark registrations.
“Sonder earned something rare: a name people remember and a standard of taste they trusted,” said John Lyotier, co-founder and CEO of TravelAI. “We did not acquire a portfolio of buildings. We acquired the one travel brand whose name already means what we are building with our memory infrastructure. Where the old Sonder’s technology once lived in the lock on the door, it now lives in discovery, memory, and AI-enabled personalization.”
Through the now-live and resurrected Sonder website, guests are able to book stays in New York City, Los Angeles, Montreal, Ottawa, Philadelphia, London, Boston, Miami, Toronto, and Chicago at boutique hotels or apartment-style accommodations managed through Booking.com, Expedia and Vrbo.
TravelAI is a subsidiary of UpNext Ventures, and applies AI throughout a portfolio of more than 530 travel brands to create “better travel,” according to the Sonder website. The company set a goal to reach one billion travelers with its technology by 2030.
Through the acquisition, TravelAI will revitalize the Sonder website by integrating its proprietary AI platform into the website to better connect travelers looking to plan trips with personalized accommodation and experience recommendations near their stays based on their personal preferences, the company said.
Lyotier added: “We intend to treat the brand with the respect it deserves: keeping what made it Sonder, and giving it a future. This is a new chapter, written with care, for the one that came before.”