Travel should be fun, not a hellish slog through dystopian security checkpoints and zombie-service employees with penal institution levels of charm.

That's why Kayak's decision to add a bit of whimsy into the travel process by adding an emoji search function is more than welcome.

If you're not emoji fluent, this is the perfect excuse to step up your emoji game and learn about some of the more obscure symbols hiding in your texting arsenal.

The function doesn’t work for all cities yet, but the first cities included are New York (🗽), Tokyo (🍣 sushi!), Chicago (🐇 O’Hare Airport), Dublin, Ireland (☘️ ), Las Vegas (slots! 🎰 ), Easter Island (🗿 ), Amsterdam (🚨 red light, get it?), Los Angeles, San Francisco (📱 yep, that's a smartphone), and Toronto (🍁 ).

As you can see, these have all been pretty well thought out, which is why the functionality is limited to a few select cities for now. Kayak is opening up a voting system for travelers to vote for their favorite emoji that matches a particular city not already included in the list.

Some of the more interesting choices pit Dallas against Boston for the football emoji, Seattle versus Bogotá, Colombia for the coffee emoji, and Milwaukee versus Munich, Germany for the all important beer emoji.

And the fun wouldn't be complete without a vote option for which city gets the famed poop (💩 ) emoji, which doesn't have any city options listed, but is open to suggestions.

The emoji search feature is live now for the first 10 cities and the next round of emoji will add 15 to the list. No, it's not disrupting the travel business in a major way, but in my opinion, it will make planning your travel just a little more pleasurable, just like it should be.

（作者：新闻中心）