Uber Launches Hotel Booking Through Expedia Partnership at Go-Get Event

Uber customers in the United States can now book hotels directly through the app, one of several new features announced Wednesday that pushes far beyond the company's original ride-hailing purpose and even deeper into its users' lives. Uber announced the new hotel booking feature on Wednesday during its product-heavy annual Go-Get event in New York City. At launch, Uber customers will have access to more than 700,000 hotels worldwide through a partnership with Expedia Group, the travel company that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi led for 12 years. Uber said vacation rental inventory from startup Vrbo will be added to the app later this year. And in a pitch to sell more customers on its Uber One subscription, Uber said members will get 20% discounts off of 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,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said 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 said. The hotel bookings, new AI-powered voice bookings feature, and a widespread search tool are among a handful of new products unveiled Wednesday that went from idea to launching in the app within months thanks to agentic AI tools like Cursor, Uber chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga told TechCrunch. “What we have seen the last few months is a fundamental reset, a new way of building software,” Naga said, adding that this shift began late last year with the emergence of agentic AI. Naga said a feature like the hotel bookings would have taken at least a year to — 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. “Our problems generally at Uber, it’s not the problem of not having ideas; there’s so many things we want to build,” he said. “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 company 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.