Sonder Battery Park Apartments Financial District — Hotel in New York

We stayed here for 7 nights in January. Me, my wife and our young son. We had a corner room (superior 1 bedroom apartment) on the 7th floor so we had great views. The complex itself is massive, with a staffed reception and plenty of lifts. We were next to the tunnel that the front of the building faces on to. Like previous reviewers have said, it is very noisy at night and I am a very light sleeper. However, after the first night I didn't notice it as much as I was so tired from exploring New York.||The room was exactly like it was in the photos and very spacious. In the kitchen we had a fridge freezer, oven with hob, microwave, coffee maker, toaster and in the corridor there was a cupboard with a washing machine and tumble dryer. The TV only works with chromecast and is very easy to setup so you can connect your phone to watch your own Netflix etc. There are no channels on the TV. The wifi is excellent.||Location wise, it's a good place to stay. The area outside felt really safe, even at night. It's right next to Battery Park so it's easy to get to the Statue of Liberty. Wall Street and Pier 11 (for the ferry to DUMBO, Brooklyn) are about 10 minutes walk away. The 9/11 Museum and Memorial are only 10 minutes walk away. There are two subway stations less than 5 minutes walk away (Rector Street and Bowling Green). You can get to the Times Square area in around 20 minutes on the subway.||There is a fantastic deli round the corner from Sonder, called West Bank Gourmet Deli. They serve amazing hot food and the staff are wonderful. They also sell a few basic groceries. There is a restaurant/diner a few minutes walk away called George's. I would highly recommend it for breakfast.||There are a few negatives from our stay at Sonder Battery Park that mean I only give it 4 stars instead of 5. Some of these have been mentioned by previous reviewers.||The heaters in the rooms are incredibly noisy. We had to drop the thermostat temperature to stop them kicking in during the night because they would without a doubt wake you instantly. So we went cold at night.||The wooden floors looks clean but if you walk on them without shoes you quickly realise how filthy they are. It seems that they are only swept and not mopped. I hope this is something Sonder seek to improve in future.||The sofa bed is awful and not really suitable for an adult. The bed in the bedroom wasn't as big as we expected so I shared the sofa bed with my son. We ended up taking it off the sofa and slept on the mattress on the floor. It's a really poor mattress and if I was booking again I'd opt for a 2 bedroom apartment instead.||Despite these issues, I would stay again. It cost us around $1000 for 7 nights at the end of January which I thought was a very good price. The Sonder app allows you to ask questions before and during your stay. They respond pretty quickly.||My wife was ill on the day we flew home and we had an evening flight. We were able to extend our check out time by 2 hours for $35 which was brilliant as it allowed my wife to rest rather than go out.||Overall, I would recommend Sonder Battery Park as an ideal place to stay for...

When you arrive it doesn’t matter that they have your last name or your reservation. Because instead of smiling and handing you a key you will stand there for 15 minutes as they insist that you download their app before checking in. (After an exhausting cross-country flight this is just the kind of experience you want.) You will not be allowed to check in unless you create a user account. Their website will not take your password because they do not find your particular choice of a capital, lowercase, unique symbol, and number adequate. But it gets better. The app requires you to scan your drivers license and, wait for it, take a selfie. Too exhausted to fight this invasion of privacy, you surrender yet more of your personal data only to find that there’s still no key, there’s a keypad code that they have to email you, now that they have your personal information. Personal information that they had already called up on your computer. You ask if there’s water in the room and the clerk says, “there’s tap.” 20 minutes later you’re finally in your room. Is there Wi-Fi? You go to look for a phone so you can call down to the desk to ask for it but… There’s no phone in the room. You go back to the website, dig through a couple pages and find that, if you search long and hard enough, there indeed is a Wi-Fi code. The room is White on White on White sort of like the living quarters for Star Wars storm trooper. There is a coffee maker but no coffee, in fact it’s a very nice kitchen but absolutely bare. There’s no minibar. You collapse onto the bed and turn on the TV. This too is another manic exercise: there is no way to turn on any television station but instead a placard about how you can cast from your phone. You just want to channel surf after your long day and you’re not even allowed to do that. I suppose that Sonder thinks they’re “disrupting” the hotel industry, but they’ve forgotten that some basic things we’re not really broke in the first place. Things like a friendly easy check in. Things like a phone where you can call the front desk. Things like I working television. And I suppose whoever owns this chain has saved money on: Cable, keys, stocking a Mini bar, and well, paint. But just yesterday they lost a bunch of customers. Because before I walked to the elevator I asked the clerk how many times that day he had had to walk people through the exasperating 15 minute experience of downloading the damn app instead of just handing them a key. He said he had to do it about 10 times.

I also asked if I could get a receipt and he said he didn’t think so. I mentioned that it would be a mandatory for my expense report so could they please email it. He wasn’t sure about that either. I’ll ask for it when I check out tomorrow but I’m not...

Overall, the apartment was perfect for us. It was bright, spacious, mostly well-outfitted for longer stays (we were there just shy of 3 weeks), and the staff were uniformly friendly and helpful.||The supplies like soap, towels, kitchen supplies and utensils, were well-thought out and useful.||It was very clean when we arrived and was easy to keep clean. It was surprisingly quiet, given its location on a major tunnel entrance/exit, and the view of very large buildings that was due to that presence on the major arterial (thus space to see the buildings rather than just walls) gave us endless entertainment. Those visible buildings were mostly if not entirely offices, so they were quiet in the evenings and weekends. The picture on this site showing the interior shows those buildings across the recessed arterial.||Things that were a little annoying and didn't really affect our affection for the place:||1) The bed was fairly wavy/not flat, and although it didn't give us backaches or anything, it was challenging to find comfortable sleeping positions. ||2) The couch (similar to the one in the picture here) was great to lie down on, not so much to sit in without adding many pillows. Since there were more pillows than we needed on the bed, this worked out fine. Not sure if it was pull-out bed, the top cushion was nice as it was. ||3) The bathtub drained slowly, so you were almost always standing in a pool. I could hear the neighboring units having the same problem, and it did always drain. That was not an issue but it was odd.||4) Seemingly because it's a building with glass front (looks like a former office building that was converted, which it was), there were no exhaust fans anywhere. The only way to get smells out was to open the glorious windows, which we did for brief times in January and which fixed the smell problem, and steam from the shower seemed to dissipate in the dry January air. Still, no exhaust fans was odd.||Again, none of those things would cause us not to stay there, except maybe if the bed was worse than it was. But it wasn't, and we would love to stay there again for even longer, and...