Uber Wants to Be the Everything App, and Hotels Are Just the Start

Summary:

• Uber expands beyond ride-hailing to offer hotel bookings, travel recommendations, and delivery services in one app.

• New features include Travel Mode, Uber One International, Eats for the Way, and a voice booking assistant for seamless travel.

• Uber’s partnership with Expedia marks the company’s shift towards becoming an “everything app” in the U.S., following global trends.

Uber is no longer just how you get there. Now it wants to be where you stay, what you eat when you arrive, and the search bar you use to find any of it.

At its annual GO–GET product event on Wednesday, the company announced a sweeping set of updates that move it deeper into travel and away from its identity as a ride-hailing platform. The headline news is a partnership with Expedia Group that brings hotel bookings directly into the Uber app, but the bigger story is the strategy underneath it.

“Consumers are spending too much time coordinating their life, using multiple apps,” Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal told the Associated Press. “Our goal with these announcements is to bring everything into one app, to help them save time, and to also help them save money.”

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was even more direct. “Uber is becoming an app for everything, helping people go, get, and now travel all in one place,” he said.

What is new

Uber users in the U.S. can now book from over 700,000 hotels through the Expedia partnership, with Uber One members earning 10% back in credits and saving at least 20% on a rolling list of more than 10,000 hotels. Vrbo vacation rentals will be added later this year.

The company also rolled out Travel Mode, which adapts the app to your destination with curated recommendations and hotel-room delivery, and Uber One International, which extends member benefits abroad starting June 1. Other new features include Eats for the Way, which lets you have your driver arrive with a pre-ordered coffee or snack, Shop for Me, which sends a shopper to pick up items from any local store, and an AI-powered voice booking assistant tied to a redesigned universal search bar.

The Expedia integration goes both ways. Uber rides will be built directly into the Expedia app starting in June.

The Everything app race is officially on in the U.S.

For years, the “everything app” model has been a Chinese and Southeast Asian phenomenon. WeChat has more than 1.3 billion monthly active users and lets people read the news, hail rides, book doctor’s appointments, and pay taxes, all without leaving the app. No U.S. platform has cracked that model at scale.

That is changing fast. Elon Musk has been openly chasing the WeChat blueprint with X, most recently rolling out X Money, a financial service that offers a 6% annual interest rate on cash deposits and 3% cashback on payments. Meta has been stacking payments, e-commerce, and gaming into Facebook. Amazon already pulls together pharmacy, grocery, and streaming.

Uber’s approach is different, and arguably smarter. Instead of building a financial layer first, it is leaning into what it already owns: real-world logistics. More than 100 million people use Uber to get to or from an airport each year, and last year, more than 1.5 billion Uber trips took place outside of a rider’s home city. The company already knows where you are going. Booking the hotel is the logical next step.

The Expedia tie-up also has a personal layer. Khosrowshahi ran Expedia for 12 years before joining Uber in 2017, and as he noted at the event, “It’s not very often when you get to partner with a company that you led for 12 years.”

The user-facing pitch is convenience. Booking a flight, a hotel, an airport ride, and dinner delivery without bouncing between four apps is a real upgrade, especially for travelers.