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Uber is expanding to handle more vacation and business trips by letting you shop for and book hotel stays directly in the Uber app, powered by Expedia.
If you’re an Uber One subscriber, you’ll also get discounts of up to 20% on bookings at 10,000 different hotels. You’ll also get 10% of your spending across all hotel bookings back in Uber credits, meaning your stay may help pay for your journey from the airport.
Uber will offer 700,000 hotels globally with its Expedia partnership, and it plans to introduce more properties through Vrbo later this year. Look for a new Hotels section on the home screen that prompts you to enter your destination and lets you filter your search.
(Credit: Uber)This comes shortly after Airbnb launched pilots in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and Madrid, allowing users to book rooms in boutique hotels rather than its usual fare of private residences.
Uber is also rejigging your app when you land in a new location, becoming a travel platform to help guide you around. It will now tell you how Uber works in the area you're visiting, including local rules, points of interest, restaurant recommendations, and tourist hotspots.
If you’re on Uber One, your benefits will also work in foreign countries from June 1, 2026. Previously, you had to be in your home country to access benefits like earning credits on rides and free delivery on food orders.
Uber Can Get Your Coffee, Shop For You
Away from adventurous travel, Uber is also rolling out improvements at home. If you're ordering an Uber Black ride, you can now add food or drinks to your car, which will be ready and waiting when your driver arrives.
For example, you can order your morning coffee for a commute, so it'll be in the passenger seat when you begin your journey. The feature launches in select cities in the coming weeks, starting in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego, and San Francisco, before expanding to more cities in the future.
A couple of weeks after launching returns in Uber Eats, the delivery app is now introducing a tool that lets you send a courier to any store to buy anything you choose. It’s called Shop for Me and is useful when a store isn’t available on Uber Eats.
For example, if you want a last-minute gift but find that the store isn't available online with fast delivery, search for a store in the app, and press Shop for Me if it's not available.
Uber Eats will then ask you to provide as much detail as possible about the item you're looking for, including photos and a budget. The courier heads to the store and asks for approval before making a purchase. You'll pay whatever the in-store price is for the item, plus delivery, but Uber hasn't yet shared how much it'll cost.
Uber is also introducing a new AI-powered feature that lets you book journeys with your voice. You can talk to your phone by pressing the microphone icon in the search bar. It understands your context with AI models, letting you do more when multitasking.
Finally, Uber and Uber Eats are set to become more closely tied, with the ridesharing app now bringing restaurants and stores into search results. It believes this means you'll need to switch between the two apps less than before. There’s currently no sign that Uber will make any changes to eliminate its separate Uber Eats app, but this may be part of a test to see whether one service could prove more intuitive in the future.