Uber walls off the agents

ON APRIL 29TH Uber, the ride-hailing giant, added hotel bookings to its flagship app through a partnership with Expedia, the online-travel company once run by Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's boss. Members of Uber One, the firm's paid subscription program, will earn 10% back in credits on every stay; a subset of about 10,000 hotels will offer up to 20% off. Vacation rentals from Expedia's Vrbo brand are to follow later this year. The casual reading is that this is the latest brick in Uber's long-promised super-app — bikes, scooters, trains, buses, flights, food, groceries, and now beds — assembled with the patience of someone who has been adding one accretive piece a quarter since 2018. The more telling detail is buried three paragraphs into the announcement, in a sentence about how the Expedia integration will work on ChatGPT.

That sentence, in essence: ChatGPT users will be able to browse Uber rides and Expedia hotels through OpenAI's chat surface, but they will still have to open the Uber app to view final prices and complete bookings. The same restriction applies to Anthropic's Claude. Discovery is permitted in the chatbot; conversion is reserved for the app. Once one notices the architecture, the Expedia deal stops looking like product expansion and starts looking like the load-bearing wall of a much bigger building.

Walled lobbies

The clearest precedent for Uber's logic comes from a company at the opposite end of the price spectrum. In late 2025 OpenAI launched Instant Checkout, which let ChatGPT users buy products directly inside the chat through an Agentic Commerce Protocol built with Stripe, the payments firm. Walmart, the world's largest retailer, was an early test case. In March, Daniel Danker, the company's executive vice-president of commerce, told an industry conference that transactions completed inside the chat window converted at 1.18%, with 77% of carts abandoned — roughly a third of Walmart.com's own conversion rate. The traffic was real. ChatGPT now accounts for about 36% of Walmart's third-party referral traffic, according to MetaRouter, an analytics firm. What collapsed was conversion. Thirty years of e-commerce optimisation — the trust badges, the saved cards, the address auto-fill, the ten thousand A/B tests — could not be reproduced inside a chat window without a name on the door.