PICS: How you can use your Zoom meetings to travel around the world

While the world is at home to curb the Covid-19 pandemic, many people are using video calls as an opportunity to virtually travel. According to Google Trends data, holiday-style Zoom backgrounds saw a huge 9.900 percent increase in searches.

And, to keep up with the trend, Luxury travel company Kuoni has released a select set of images and video to be used as Zoom backgrounds.

Kuoni has made 14 backgrounds available, which include 12 images and two videos, that reflect some of their most popular destinations. From Bangkok cityscapes to crystal-clear Caribbean waters, the collection offers a range of amazing travel landscapes.

James Nye from Kuoni describes how the idea came about: “Just a few days into lockdown we started to hear about people using our destination images as backgrounds to their video calls, to at least momentarily transport them to somewhere else in the world.

“Coupled with the increase in online searches for travel-inspired video call backgrounds, we wanted to release a collection that hopefully gives people a slice of their dream holiday while they’re at home.”

Nye said Kuoni delved into the search data to discover which destinations and landscapes saw the largest surge in popularity for virtual backgrounds. The most popular was The Caribbean, which saw a whopping 9.900 percent increase in searches. The data also revealed that long-haul destinations were favourite choices, with only Sweden making it into the top five from Europe.

When looking at holiday types, such as dramatic mountain scenes or serene waterfalls, safari took top honours followed by mountain views and cityscapes.

Here are the most popular Zoom background destinations: