Uber's product chief on hotel bets, Waymo tensions, and the data hedge

Uber isn’t content just moving people and pad thai anymore. In a wide-ranging conversation, Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal laid out a vision that stitches together hotel bookings via a deep Expedia integration, boat rentals in Europe, and a nascent but telling move into physical-world data collection through a new unit called AV Labs.

Kansal confirmed the travel push is deliberate. The company noticed that 1.5 billion trips on its platform happen outside a user’s home city each year, making travel the self-described “third leg of the stool” alongside rides and delivery. The Expedia partnership isn’t a shallow handoff; Uber rebuilt the entire user interface natively. For members of Uber One—a program that now counts 51 million subscribers and drives roughly half of all bookings—that means a 10% cash back in Uber credits on a $1,000 hotel stay. That’s $100 plowed right back into the ecosystem. Financial services for consumers, however, remain fuzzy. Kansal hedged on building a proprietary buy-now-pay-later product, insisting they’d rather lean on existing partners.

What’s harder to parse is the strategic dance with autonomous vehicle partners, particularly Waymo. The six-month-old AV Labs unit is building a fleet of sensor-laden vehicles entirely separate from the driver network. Kansal frames this as strengthening partnerships, but owning a distinct data-gathering operation looks a lot like a hedge against the very AV partners Uber relies on. When you compete with companies you also hold equity in, controlling the data layer offers both leverage and optionality. Kansal didn’t pretend otherwise: the AV playbook is about ensuring Uber isn’t just a dumb pipe for someone else’s robotaxis. The subtext is clear—Uber plans to be indispensable, no matter who wins the autonomy race.