Uber clients in the USA can now guide accommodations immediately by means of the app, one in every of a number of new options introduced Wednesday that pushes far past the corporate’s unique ride-hailing goal and even deeper into its customers’ lives.
Uber introduced the brand new hotel-booking characteristic on Wednesday throughout its product-heavy annual Go-Get occasion in New York Metropolis. At launch, Uber clients may have entry to greater than 700,000 accommodations worldwide by means of a partnership with Expedia Group, the journey firm that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi led for 12 years.
Uber stated trip rental stock from startup Vrbo shall be added to the app later this yr.
And in a pitch to promote extra clients on its Uber One subscription, Uber stated members will get 20% reductions on a rolling listing of 10,000 accommodations when booked by means of the app. Members can even obtain 10% again in Uber Credit on all bookings.
“We’re not simply an app for rides, and even two apps, or [a] household of apps for each rides and eats,” Khosrowshahi stated in the course of the firm’s occasion.
“Uber is now an app for the whole lot, the place you possibly can go, you will get, and now you possibly can journey,” he stated.
The lodge bookings, a brand new AI-powered voice-bookings characteristic, and a widespread search device are amongst a handful of recent merchandise unveiled Wednesday that went from concept to launching within the app inside months because of agentic AI instruments like Cursor, Uber chief know-how officer Praveen Neppalli Naga informed TechCrunch.
“What now we have seen the previous couple of months is a elementary reset, a brand new approach of constructing software program,” Naga stated, including that this shift started late final yr with the emergence of agentic AI.
Naga stated a characteristic just like the lodge bookings would have taken no less than a yr to convey to market — a prolonged course of that features the preliminary improvement, constructing it, after which testing and debugging earlier than launching it to clients. That timeframe has been lower in half, and he expects now that extra engineers have adopted these agentic AI workflows, they’ll transfer even quicker.
“Our issues usually at Uber, it’s not the issue of not having concepts; there’s so many issues we need to construct,” he stated. “It’s simply at all times the issue of, we don’t have sufficient time or resourcing to construct these items.”
Throughout its Go-Get occasion, Uber additionally launched journey mode, which provides customers a information masking vacationer hotspots, native favorites, and different useful info immediately associated to the place they’re visiting. Uber prolonged the journey mode to its Uber Eats supply product as effectively by including a “room service” hub that lists generally forgotten objects. This characteristic will ultimately embrace curated eating suggestions and the choice to guide a desk by means of OpenTable.
The corporate can also be rolling out a characteristic referred to as “Eats for the Method,” which permits clients who’ve reserved an Uber Black to additionally order a drink or snack that shall be within the car when it arrives.
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