Uber to add planes, trains, hotel, and bus bookings into its app
Uber is planning to add trains, coaches, buses, and flights into its app.
The move would make the taxi app into a “seamless door-to-door experience”, said Jamie Heywood, Uber’s regional general manager for UK, northern and eastern Europe.
It is hoped that the move would mean Uber could siphon a commission when customers book train or bus tickets, especially as a significant portion of people booking Ubers did so in order to get to their airport.
“You have been able to book rides, bikes, boat services and scooters on the Uber app for a number of years, so adding trains and coaches is a natural progression,” Mr Heywood said, adding that the Eurostar would be included in the app.
“Later this year we plan to incorporate flights, and in the future hotels, by integrating leading partners into the Uber app to create a seamless door-to-door travel experience.”
Uber has had intentions of being a ‘super app’ – meaning that users can arrange other services through it – since 2018, one year after chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi took control of the firm. The coronavirus pandemic slowed down that development, meaning that Uber pivoted its focus into the food delivery service.
“It’s fair to say that Covid made it a little bit hard for us to progress as quickly as we would like,” Mr Heywood told the Financial Times.
“With Covid behind us, with this big push into new modes of transport, we want to signal that this is a very important growth lever for us over the coming years.”
It is unclear yet whether the app would offer tickets from rail and bus operators directly or work with an existing aggregator, but flight bookings, Mr Heywood said, will launch next year and hotel reservations could come in 2024.
