On the face of it, it seems like a worrying idea.

Uber's success has been about evolving a core product in an emerging category. Product-market fit or whatever you like to call that kind of narrow, aggressive focus. As little "hair" as possible. Market share. Simply defined product. Simply defined (and bull-headed) strategy. Basically, make uber a significant mode of transport (again!).

Expedia is all about maximizing revenue from the existing mess of travel product categories. Finding ways of inserting themselves between consumers and: hotels, flights, rentals, tours.... Basically, people are going places and doing things. Get expedia a piece of it.

Very different approaches.

If uber starts to retain customers with miles or try to diversify revenue sources, I think it'd be a bad sign. But, who knows.

I respectfully disagree. I think that Uber has done a great job of hooking a large volume of consumers on their core product, and now there is a huge opportunity to leverage that base to create income streams all over the travel space. Considering their trouble with reaching profitability, I think this makes too much sense to avoid doing it due to concerns of losing focus on the core product. Uber is a not a startup anymore!

It also creates large swaths of potentially lucrative revenue opportunities based on the size of the Uber user base, without the quantifiability of those swaths that you would see in core-product market expansion, or core-product optimization.

The cynic in me says that you can juice Uber with a bunch of these tie-ins, box out competitors by creating these partnerships, and IPO at a valuation based on aspirational performance of these partnerships that would make most people happy.

I can certainly see our two positions sitting on the table with a strong, conventional business case for yours. It might even be right.

(btw, thanks for the friendly disagreement. Much appreciated)

Uber already has a points deal going with Starwood Hotels - SPG points are a fairly common currency among the "professional" points collectors, as they're super-exchangeable for just about any airline, but probably not the kind of deal that will work for average consumers (especially since they only start awarding points after you've actually stayed at a Starwood property).

I expect less innovation, and more "staying the course" and cleaning up processes for a stable IPO. Many sins will be forgiven if investors get liquidity.

They should start a credit card business. Rakuten did this to great effect in Japan. Use the credit card, get points you can use for Uber. Customer acquisition is as cheap as putting a signup form in the back of each car and incentivizing drivers to mention it.

Barclays is already rolling out an Uber credit card: https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-and-lyft-look-to-hail-cred...

Searched around for it but there looks to be very little known info about the card right now (no rewards description etc).

An ubercoin and ICO would be more buzzword compliant.

We need an ICO jar. One Bitcoin in the jar everytime an ICO is mentioned in jest.

Given the current value of bitcoin, I think we'd need to put a satoshi in the jar (I'm personally not swimming in bitcoin)

UCO: Uber Coin Offering. The coins are mined by the power created by the regenerative braking of Uber vehicles.

They should do some sort of bankless electronic payments like their competitor go Jek in SE Asia is doing

Car Rentals! https://about.sixt.com/websites/sixt_cc/English/2699/directo...

Seems like a very complicated business to get into compared to chauffeurs, no? In Paris, Uber doesn't seem to handle cars at all. The drivers buy/rent cars from wherever and drive. And drivers are in charge of their car's maintenance, repairs, etc. Uber provides the smartphone apps and underlying platform. That's a challenge in and of itself, but not at the same challenge as maintaining thousands of vehicles I would bet.

Although car rental is well overdue for some disruption, I don't really see how Uber overlaps with it. I typically rent a car if I need to go long distances for multiple days, typically to remote areas where Uber doesn't serve (I currently write this from the Piedmonte mountain region of Italy).

I think he's going to go on an acquisition spree to enhance their market share outside of the US.

Watch the international space closely, uber had to retrench itself from a few international markets and it seems like those decisions may get revisited.

Wait what?

Uber is losing money and can probably only continue losing this amount of money for a few years, he needs to make sure Uber doesn't go bankrupt in the short term.

From about a month ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-and-lyft-look-to-hail-cred...