KAYAK recently rolled out travel search by emoji with the introduction of ten searchable emoji/city combinations, with more on the way, from the Statue of Liberty emoji for NYC to a slot machine for Las Vegas, travelers can now use emojis to kick off their next flight and/or hotel search.
"We are always looking for ways to make KAYAK even more fun and easy to use - adding emoji to the search experience is a great way to do that," said David Solomito, VP NA brand marketing, KAYAK. "However our users want to search, whether it's with emojis, bots or voice - we will be there."
To help make KAYAK even more emoji-friendly, KAYAK is calling on travelers to vote on which city and emoji combinations to enable next.
"As soon as we started assigning emojis to cities, debate over which city should get the pizza, the beer, and the baseball emoji began among our team," said Solomito. "We decided to start with emoji combinations that were indisputable and from there, open it up to a public vote to help us decide the next round of emojis to add to KAYAK."
Travelers can visit www.kayak.com/emoji to cast their vote on the next 15 emoji/city combinations. Emojis up for a city match include: Baseball, Pizza, Beer Mug, the Pride Flag, High-heeled Shoe, Unicorn, the Dancing Lady, Guitar, Taco, Football, Coffee, Tropical Drink, Surfing, Ski/Snowboarding and Hockey. KAYAK offers four city suggestions in each emoji category and the opportunity for a write-in vote.
The emoji + city pair with the most votes in each category will win, ultimately giving travelers the ability to search for up to 25 destinations on KAYAK via emoji.
Voting will conclude on July 13, 2017 and the winning combinations will be revealed on July 17 just in time for World Emoji Day. On the 17th, KAYAK will also make searchable the country flag emojis, bringing the total number of searchable emojis on KAYAK to over 250.
Searchable emojis will kick-off searches in the U.S. and Canada on desktop and mobile devices as well as on KAYAK's bot for Facebook Messenger.
