Plan your trip on a single application, from the door of your home to the threshold of your vacation rental. This is the stated promise of Uber, which will offer a flight reservation service from its application this summer in the United Kingdom.
In September 2022, the San Francisco company had already integrated the reservation of trains and coaches on British territory into its offer. A month later, Uber signed a partnership with Heathrow Express, the main shuttle service between the eponymous airport and central London.
“Uber is truly a one-stop travel solution”, welcomes Andrew Brem, general manager for the United Kingdom of the American company in a press release published Thursday, May 11. To offer this new option, Uber is partnering with Hopper, a young Quebec company specializing in trip planning.
The press release does not mention any deployment in the rest of the world. In France, the application has integrated the Flixbus bus lines since 2018 and displays a public transport route for its users located in the Paris region.
The Uber Everything strategy
In 2019, Uber was already offering to fly in the skies of New York with UberCopter. For 200 dollars (183 euros) residents of the Big Apple could book helicopter rides from Manhattan and JFK Airport. A year later, the Covid-19 pandemic and the confinements got the better of this service.
All these diversification efforts are part of a broader strategy. Since its creation, Uber has endeavored not to lock itself into the VTC market alone. In 2015, the San Francisco start-up developed a branch internally nicknamed Uber Everything, responsible for developing new services in parallel with its main activity. It was in this incubator that Uber Eats, the home meal delivery service now present in 6,000 cities in 45 different countries, was imagined. With 3.1 billion dollars (2.8 billion euros) in turnover in the first quarter of 2023, the delivery of meals currently represents more than a third of the income of the American company.
This diversification strategy now seems to be bearing fruit. If inflation and economic uncertainty have affected its competitors, Uber unveiled quarterly results at the beginning of May, with a loss lower than forecast at 157 million dollars (143 million euros). The Californian firm even allows itself to dream of a first profitable year for the year 2023.