Uber has launched flight bookings on its UK app as part of the ride booking giant’s drive to become a travel ‘super app’, allowing customers to book a full journey across multiple forms of transport.
The San Francisco-based group has begun rolling out the new booking tool for domestic and international flights for UK customers and plans to roll it out to users across the country in the coming weeks.
Andrew Brem, chief executive of Uber in the UK, told the Financial Times that the launch of commercial flight bookings was the “latest and most ambitious step” in the company’s strategy to expand its core travel booking business. into a larger travel booking platform.
The UK, one of Uber’s largest markets outside of North America, serves as a testing ground for these ambitions, and Uber has already rolled out domestic train, Eurostar and bus ticket reservations in the country.
Brem said train bookings have already proved “incredibly popular” with customers and have grown 40% month-over-month since their launch last year, without disclosing how many tickets have been sold.
Uber has partnered with travel booking company Hopper to sell flights and will take a small commission from each sale. It also has the option to add a booking fee in the future.
The move is part of a long-term vision by CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who first spoke of Uber becoming a larger travel platform in 2018. This plan has been delayed by the pandemic, which has brought the travel and transportation, and led the group to focus on its food delivery business.
Uber has attempted to offer flights in the past through a different model. In 2019, it launched $200 helicopter rides in the United States for travel between Manhattan and JFK Airport under the Uber Copter brand, which was essentially a charter flight broker. The service was canceled in 2020 following the onset of pandemic lockdowns around the world.
One benefit of adding the option to book flights to its app will be to funnel more users into Uber’s core ride booking business, including offering discounted rides to the airport with a flight booking.
About 15% of Uber’s global revenue comes from airport trips, while in the UK, 40% of trips start or end near transit hubs.
“We hope to build on our core business,” Brem said. He said the group hoped to expand bookings on other forms of transport, including flights to more countries, but did not have “firm plans” at the time.
The push for diversification comes as Uber results this month it has shown that it has continued to weather rising inflation and economic uncertainty better than expected and relative to its rivals.
He also passed a rocky period in the UK, which has seen demand for its ride booking services rapidly outstrip the number of available drivers as the economy reopens. This has been solved in part by raising pay and rates and now has more drivers working in the UK than before the pandemic.
“We saw an incredible rebound in passenger demand last year and it took a while for drivers to come back,” Brem said.
Brem said it “hoped” users had noticed improved service reliability, but couldn’t guarantee rates wouldn’t increase further to keep drivers working on the app.
The chief executive of rival private rental firm Addison Lee, which also hiked rates, said last week he wasn’t thinking about it further price increases were possible given the current economic environment.
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