Uber’s CPO on Hotels, AV Labs, and Why It Won’t Be a Super-App

Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal spoke with TechCrunch on July 13, 2026, walking through the company's expanding product surface: hotel bookings via Expedia, a "shop for me" concierge feature, boat rentals in Europe, and a six-month-old unit called AV Labs that runs sensor-equipped vehicles to collect large-scale driving data. With 51 million Uber One members and Uber Eats now independently profitable, Kansal argues travel is the "third leg of the stool" after rides and delivery, while insisting Uber does not want to become an Asian-style super-app.

What happened

Detail	Fact
Uber One members	51 million, roughly half of all bookings
Annual trips outside home city	1.5 billion
Hotel cash-back (members)	10% on hotel spend (e.g. $100 back on $1,000)
AV Labs age	Six months old as of July 2026
Uber Eats profitability	Independently profitable for several quarters

In a TechCrunch interview published July 13, 2026, Kansal described travel as the company’s third major product pillar. The logic is straightforward: 1.5 billion annual Uber trips happen outside a user’s home city, so hotels, airport rides, and local food delivery overlap naturally. The Expedia hotel integration is built directly inside Uber’s own UI, a deeper approach than the boat rental feature in Europe, which hands users off to a partner’s booking flow at checkout.

Uber One members booking hotels receive 10% in Uber credits back, redeemable on rides and food orders. Kansal said delivery users typically break even on their monthly membership fee within two to three orders, and the data shows cross-category behavior: ride-only users start ordering food, and delivery-only users start booking rides.

What is AV Labs and why does it matter?

AV Labs is a separate fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles that does not use Uber’s regular driver network. Its purpose is to gather large volumes of driving data, which Uber can share with autonomous vehicle partners. Uber already holds equity in several of those partners, and Kansal framed AV Labs as a way to deepen those relationships.

What Kansal did not say directly is that Uber also competes with some of those same partners. Waymo is the most prominent example. Owning a proprietary data layer gives Uber both leverage and an alternative path if partnerships sour. It is a hedge dressed up as collaboration, and it is worth watching how it develops as robotaxis expand into more cities.

For businesses tracking AI and automation investment, AV Labs is a reminder that the most durable AI moats are often built on proprietary data rather than model access. Anyone thinking about their own AI integration strategy faces the same underlying question: who controls the data the model learns from?

Financial services: debit cards yes, buy now pay later maybe

Uber already offers drivers and couriers the Uber Pro card, a debit card they can transfer earnings onto. Merchant-side financial products are in early experiments in some markets. For consumers, the current financial layer is Uber credits tied to the membership program. Kansal declined to commit to a consumer buy-now-pay-later product, saying Uber prefers to partner with specialists rather than build every capability itself.

Why it matters

The 51 million member figure is significant. A membership program at that scale creates a self-reinforcing loop: members use more services, which justifies more service categories, which makes the membership more valuable. That dynamic is harder to compete with than any single feature.

The explicit rejection of the “everything app” framing is also deliberate. Asian super-apps like Grab bundle financial services, social commerce, and logistics under one roof. Uber is adding adjacent services, but Kansal’s repeated emphasis on partnering with “the experts” suggests the company wants the revenue from these categories without the operational complexity of owning them outright.

For anyone running digital advertising or tracking platform behavior, Uber’s travel push is worth noting. Expedia inventory appearing inside Uber changes where hotel searches and conversions happen. If Uber travel scales, it fragments yet another category away from traditional search. That has downstream effects for organic search strategy in travel and hospitality.

Our take

The AV Labs announcement is the most strategically interesting piece here, even though it got the least attention. Uber building its own sensor-fleet data operation, while holding equity in the very AV companies it competes with, is a careful positioning move. The company is making sure it has something to trade no matter who wins the robotaxi market.

The hotel and travel push is logical but not guaranteed to work. Booking hotels inside a ride app requires a behavior shift that Uber credits alone may not be enough to drive. The 10% cashback offer is real money, but only for users who already think of Uber as a travel brand. That mental model shift is the actual product challenge, and it takes longer than a single feature launch.

Uber Eats being independently profitable is the quiet win in this interview. Early food delivery economics were brutal across the whole industry. That Uber Eats no longer needs ride-hailing as a subsidy gives the company real flexibility. For context on how platform businesses build toward that kind of cross-product profitability, our Sun Valley 2026 recap covers how the largest tech platforms are currently thinking about bundling and leverage.

What to do about it

1. If you run a hotel, hospitality, or travel business, check whether your inventory or brand will appear in Uber’s Expedia-powered hotel tab and what that means for your direct booking strategy.
2. If you advertise in travel categories, monitor whether Uber’s in-app hotel bookings start pulling search intent away from Google and traditional OTAs.
3. Watch AV Labs. If Uber begins licensing or publishing that driving dataset, it will signal how serious the company is about becoming an infrastructure layer for autonomous vehicles, not just a consumer app.

Uber’s real product bet is that membership loyalty compounds faster than any single competitor can replicate individual features.

Source: TechCrunch · AI