Uber customers in the United States can now book hotels directly through the app, one of several novel features declared Wednesday that pushes far beyond the company’s original ride-hailing purpose and even deeper into its users’ lives.

Uber stated the novel hotel-booking feature on Wednesday during its product-heavy annual Go-Get event in Updated York City. At launch, Uber customers will have access to more than 700,000 hotels worldwide through a partnership with Expedia Group, the travel firm that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi led for 12 years.

Uber mentioned vacation rental inventory from startup Vrbo will be added to the app later this year.

And in a pitch to auction more customers on its Uber One subscription, Uber mentioned members will get 20% discounts on a rolling list of 10,000 hotels when booked through the app. Members will also receive 10% back in Uber Credits on all bookings.

“We’re no longer just an app for rides, or even two apps, or [a] family of apps for both rides and eats,” Khosrowshahi noted during the company’s event.

“Uber is now an app for everything, where you can go, you can get, and now you can travel,” he noted.

The hotel bookings, a novel AI-powered voice-bookings feature, and a widespread search tool are among a handful of updated products unveiled Wednesday that went from idea to launching in the app within months thanks to agentic AI tools like Cursor, Uber chief software officer Praveen Neppalli Naga told TechCrunch.

“What we have seen the last few months is a fundamental reset, a fresh way of building software,” Naga noted, adding that this shift began late last year with the emergence of agentic AI.

Naga mentioned a feature like the hotel bookings would have taken at least a year to bring to marketplace — a lengthy process that includes the initial development, building it, and then testing and debugging before launching it to customers. That timeframe has been cut in half, and he expects now that more engineers have adopted these agentic AI workflows, they will move even faster. Furthermore, experts in startup note the continued relevance.

“Our problems generally at Uber, it’s not the problem of not having ideas; there’s so many things we want to build,” he noted. “It’s just always the problem of, we don’t have enough time or resourcing to build these things.”

During its Go-Get event, Uber also launched travel mode, which gives users a guide covering tourist hotspots, local favorites, and other helpful information directly related to where they’re visiting. Uber extended the travel mode to its Uber Eats delivery product as well by adding a “room service” hub that lists commonly forgotten items. This feature will eventually include curated dining recommendations and the option to book a table through OpenTable.

The organization is also rolling out a feature called “Eats for the Way,” which allows customers who have reserved an Uber Black to also order a drink or snack that will be in the vehicle when it arrives.

Topics

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a slight commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. This also touches on aspects of user interface.