Uber wants to be your travel agent, concierge, and personal shopper next
The company that pulled onto the road nearly 16 years ago as Uber Cab increasingly seems less interested in driving than in what users do before and after summoning a ride through its app. The latest evidence of Uber’s shift toward becoming a broader services platform came at its Go-Get event this week in New York, where the company led with hotel keys instead of car keys. “I believe that Uber truly offers one service: We give you your time back,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at the start of the company’s roughly 40-minute presentation. The features unveiled invited a new comparison for Uber, not to ride-hail rival Lyft, but to one of its corporate neighbors in San Francisco: Airbnb. Much like Airbnb’s expansion into “experiences” and other services, alongside its move into listing boutique hotels, Uber’s latest offerings suggest similar ambitions to make its app indispensable throughout an entire trip. But ambitions that sweeping, captured in the “One app for everything” headline of Uber’s press release, warrant scrutiny over what customers actually gain from this single-app convenience. (See also: Elon Musk’s still-unrealized plans to turn X into an “everything” app.) Uber, but for hotels Consider the in-app hotel booking feature that opened the presentation, which essentially embeds the hotel-search functionality of Khosrowshahi’s former employer, Expedia, and routes it through Uber’s payment system. “Booking a hotel on Uber is going to feel as easy as booking a ride,” VP of Product Amit Fulay said onstage. Subscribers to Uber’s $9.99-per-month Uber One membership, the subject of a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed in April 2025 over allegedly deceptive marketing, receive additional perks: at least 20% savings at what small print on a slide described as “a rolling list of properties,” along with a 10% rebate in Uber One credits. [Screenshot: Uber] As any expert in travel-loyalty programs can tell you, booking a hotel through a third-party site often means forfe