Kayak's new desktop app inspires wanderlust from the cubicle

Mobile may be gaining ground for travel research and bookings, but the desktop still dominates.

Now Kayak is targeting consumers where they search with a new desktop app to inspire wanderlust.

Desktop Escape puts a rotating selection of 90 Instagram-worthy destination photos as a computer’s wallpaper with the current lowest airfare visible at the top.

A click on the “Escape” button brings up travel tips, current weather in the destination and a list of airline options and prices.

“With a third of Kayak searches being done on mobile - it’s a big focus for us - but desktop is still a key part of our how people search for travel,” says David Solomito, vice president of marketing at Kayak.

“In fact, we’ve found that travel searches spike during the workday with the most popular time to search for travel between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. So, rather than using your lunch hour to search endlessly for your next vacation, we introduced Desktop Escape to make it easier for travelers to plan their next getaway.”

Many of the destinations shown in the app are from Kayak's 2018 Travel Hacker Guide, a compilation based on more than 1.5 billion searches.

Desktop Escape is part of Kayak’s “Change of Scenery” ad campaign.

It follows a similar in-office ploy from Kayak last year to get workers to book from their cubicles. Dubbed @work, the tool disguised a travel search engine as a spreadsheet.