Oh boy, just when you thought searching for international flights couldn’t get any easier (or maybe more complicated, depending on which generation you represent), CheapFlights is eyeing a world where emojis rule the travel search space.

Flying Chengdu to Sydney? That’s 13 whole characters you need to type in. (Insert outrage emoji here.) Why do all that work when a simple panda emoji and koala emoji will get you the same results, only with 11 fewer key strokes?

“We want to make travel search as intuitive as possible, and delivering this new functionality furthers our brand promise to make search smart and simple," said Samantha Otter, Cheapflights’ marketing director. "Personalization is the future of travel search, and this is a further step in that direction, allowing our users to communicate with us in a way they’re comfortable. It encourages frictionless dialogue in whichever setting and communication medium they prefer.

Okay if you’re thinking, “what the heck’s an emoji,” you’re clearly of a more senior generation. Emojis are cute little one-symbol image representation of everything under the sun from tacos to cocktails to airplanes. Kind of like a supremely advanced version of the colon + right parenthesis duo that represents a happy face.

Emojis tend to be most popular among iPhone users as Androids have more limited emoji offerings. And while you can see emojis everywhere these days, they still tend to be most popular on Instagram posts.

In case you’re keeping track, Sunday, July 17 is World Emoji Day, so expect to see these little icons everywhere this weekend.

In this case, everywhere includes the updated search algorithm at the Cheapflights website. That’s right, the flight search and travel deals website has become the first website in the world to offer a flight search function powered by emojis.

“With World Emoji Day upon us, it felt like the ideal time to press the button on a function with which our team has had a lot of fun in the last few weeks. We hope our users do now as well.”

The modified search tool will start as a prototype, with 40 destinations mapped to a corresponding emoji. Traveling from Toronto? Simply use a Canada flag emoji. Using a surfer gets you flights to Honolulu, Hawaii; a four-leaf clover returns info on Dublin; and a ramen bowl will yield data on Tokyo.

You can view more of Cheapflights emoji -destination pairings here.

The emoji search is also available at Cheapflights Chat, a Facebook Messenger that provides flight, hotel and weather-related results, which launched last month.

Emoji search is available on the Cheapflights mobile site in select markets globally including the UK, Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. It will be available on the Cheapflights app before the end of 2016. 

For more information, visit www.cheapflights.ca.

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