Uber has always wanted to be more than a ride; now it has reason to hurry
Key takeaways
- For years, Uber talked about becoming a super app.
- Uber One members — the company s subscription tier at $9.99 a month — get 20% off a rotating list of 10,000 hotels and 10% back in credits.
- Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber s CTO, offered the clearest explanation of the company s thinking at TechCrunch s StrictlyVC event late last month in San Francisco.
For years, Uber talked about becoming a super app. Then Waymo started picking up passengers in San Francisco, and the conversation grew more urgent. The company has been trying to embed itself inside the AV industry — as a data provider, an investor, and a distribution platform — but the consumer-facing bet may be just as important.
Two weeks ago, Uber held its annual GO-GET product event in New York and announced something its executives had been circling for a long time: users in the U.S. can now book hotels inside the Uber app, through a partnership with Expedia Group, with access to more than 700,000 properties worldwide. Uber One members — the company s subscription tier at $9.99 a month — get 20% off a rotating list of 10,000 hotels and 10% back in credits. Vacation rentals through Vrbo will follow later this year, along with restaurant reservations via OpenTable. In the meantime, a Shop for Me feature lets users order from stores that aren t even on the platform.
The announcements, taken together, were the most concrete picture yet of something Uber has been trying to conjure since at least 2019: that an app with 199 million monthly active users could become the app they use for nearly everything.