Uber has launched a flight booking service on its UK app, as part of the travel booking giant’s push to become a travel “super app”, allowing customers to book complete journeys with multiple modes of transport.
The San Francisco-based group has started rolling out a new booking tool for domestic and international flights for UK customers and plans to expand it to users across the country in the coming weeks.
Andrew Brem, Uber’s UK managing director, told the Financial Times that the launch of commercial flight bookings was the “latest and most ambitious” in the company’s strategy to expand its core ride booking business into a wider travel booking platform. A vigorous step.”
Britain, one of Uber’s biggest markets outside of North America, is serving as a testing ground for these ambitions, with Uber already launching domestic train, Eurostar and coach ticket bookings in the country.
Brem said train bookings had proven “incredibly popular” with customers, growing 40% a month since launching last year, but he did not disclose the number of tickets sold.
Uber has partnered with travel booking company Hopper to sell flights and will take a small commission on each sale. It also has the option to increase booking fees in the future.
The move is part of a long-term vision for Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi, who first spoke in 2018 of Uber becoming a broader travel platform. That plan has been delayed by the pandemic, which has brought the travel and transport industries to a standstill and led the group to focus on its food delivery business.
Uber has experimented with offering flight services through different models in the past. In 2019, it launched a $200 helicopter service in the U.S. to fly between Manhattan and JFK Airport under the Uber Copter brand, essentially a charter broker. The service was canceled in 2020 after the start of the global pandemic lockdown.
One benefit of adding the option to book flights on its app would be to draw more users into Uber’s main ride-booking business, which includes discounted airport rides by booking flights.
About 15% of Uber’s total bookings are to airports, and in the UK 40% of trips start or end near transport hubs.
“We want to build our core business,” Bream said. He said the group wanted to expand bookings for other modes of transport, including flights to more countries, but had “no firm plans” at the moment.
The diversification push comes as Uber’s results this month showed it continues to weather rising inflation and economic uncertainty better than expected compared to rivals.
It’s also overcoming tough times in the U.K., where demand for its ride-booking service quickly outstripped the number of available drivers as the economy reopened. This has been partly addressed by wage and fare increases, with more drivers now working in the UK than before the pandemic.
“There was an incredible rebound in passenger demand last year and it will take a while to get drivers back,” Bream said.
Bream said he “hopes” users notice the service’s greater reliability, but there’s no guarantee fares won’t rise further to keep drivers using the app.
Last week, the chief executive of rival private hire company Addison Lee also raised fares, saying he did not think further increases were likely given the current economic backdrop.
This article has been edited to clarify that airport travel accounts for about 15% of Uber’s total bookings