Uber has made its most concrete move yet toward becoming a genuine super app, announcing at its annual GO-GET product event in New York that US users can now book hotels directly inside the Uber app through a partnership with Expedia Group, with access to more than 700,000 properties worldwide. Uber One subscribers — the company's $9.99 monthly membership tier — receive 20% off a rotating selection of 10,000 hotels and 10% back in credits. Vacation rentals through Vrbo are coming later this year, restaurant reservations through OpenTable are on the way, and a "Shop for Me" feature already lets users order from stores that are not on the Uber Eats platform. Taken together, the announcements represent the clearest articulation yet of what Uber has been building toward since at least 2019: an app used by 199 million monthly active users that becomes the default interface for travel, food, accommodation, and commerce rather than just rides.

Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga explained the strategic logic at a recent TechCrunch event by pointing to membership as the glue that makes the super app model work in a US context where previous attempts have failed. Super apps succeeded in India and Southeast Asia partly because alternatives were fragmented and inferior. In the US, people already have apps they like for most of what Uber wants to do, which means the value proposition needs to be compelling enough to justify consolidation. Uber One's discounts and credits across an expanding range of categories provide that incentive — every new service added to the platform gives users another reason to pay the monthly fee and another reason to stay inside the Uber ecosystem rather than switching to a specialized competitor. Uber One now has 50 million paying subscribers who collectively account for roughly half the company's total bookings, a concentration that gives the membership tier significant strategic weight as a retention and expansion mechanism.