Expensify Partners with Uber to Bring SmartRides to Business Travelers Worldwide

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Aug 20, 2014, 09:05 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 20,2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Expensify has announced a partnership with Uber to debut SmartRides, a savvy new addition to Expensify Trips that reinvents the way people travel. Expensify Trips currently tracks a user's hotel reservations and provides flight status updates for travel itineraries. With SmartRides, Expensify takes travel convenience to the next level: upon landing, an Uber can be automatically ordered to take the traveler straight to their destination, completing the "last mile" of a long journey in style.

Expensify Partners with Uber to Bring SmartRides to Business Travelers Worldwide (PRNewsFoto/Expensify)

Using SmartRides is easy: once the plane lands, users are prompted by the Expensify app to select their desired Uber service so that a driver will be waiting as soon as they reach the curb. SmartRides lets users skip the taxi line after a long flight, avoid the stress of finding a hotel in a new city, and move quickly from airport runway to hotel lobby with one simple tap.

"This is without question the most significant API launch in years, and it will be a decade before the dust has truly settled," says Expensify CEO, David Barrett. "Uber's vision is about obviating the need for personal car ownership; that may be be hard to imagine for many people, but SmartRides is an incredibly tangible and significant step in that direction."

SmartRides is the first phase of a deeper integration between Expensify and Uber. In the coming weeks, Expensify will fully integrate with Uber For Business, which will allow customers to centrally bill and manage an employee's Uber trips to increase transparency in company spending. Although it has always been simple to get Uber receipts into Expensify, this will further improve the process and make the already simple one-step process fully automated.

This is the next step in Expensify's much anticipated progression towards ambient computing - the next evolution of cloud computing. Barrett believes the shift towards a Google Now-like experience is an extremely powerful one, and given the deep insight Expensify has, this partnership has the potential to greatly improve the traveling experience for people everywhere.

About Expensify

Founded by CEO David Barrett in 2008 with a dream of ridding the world of expense report frustration, Expensify does "expense reports that don't suck!" With Expensify, create and submit your entire expense report from your smartphone or on the web to quickly get reimbursed directly to your bank account. Seamless integrations with all major accounting packages, rich mobile apps to log expenses on the go, and integrated direct deposit make Expensify the clear choice for business expense reporting and travel. Expensify is used by over 300,000 companies and 2 million users, reimbursing millions of dollars a day and processing billions each year.

About Uber Technologies

Uber is a technology platform that is evolving the way the world moves. By seamlessly connecting riders to drivers through our apps, we make cities more accessible, opening up more possibilities for riders and more business for drivers.From our founding in 2009 to our launches in over 170 cities today, Uber's rapidly expanding global presence continues to bring people and their cities closer.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140820/137702

SOURCE Expensify