If you're planning a trip to New York City anytime soon, it might be worth staying at Manhattan's branch of Aloft Hotel. Why? Well, I'm sure there are a lot of reasons for it, but right now, I'm talking about one very particular reason: You can actually order room service with emoji there. Just, you know, in case it's not a "words" kind of day for you. The hotel, which opened this location only a few months ago, now offers a menu of room service packages you can order through the simple act of texting the hotel a string of emoji. Once you've sent the tiny pictures to the appropriate number, the corresponding goods will show up at your door promptly.
According to Mashable, packages include a "hangover package," which is ordered using the banana, water droplet, and pill emoji and features Advil, Vitamin Water, and two bananas; there's also a "munchies" package, which is ordered with the chocolate bar, lollipop, and cookie emoji and consists of a soda, some chips, a candy bar, and a chocolate brownie. While it's unclear whether an eggplant emoji will serve as a "do not disturb" sign for housekeeping services, it is clear that we are living in the future, folks. Pretty soon we'll just be able to imagine what we want and it shall be.
But Aloft Hotels aren't the only company integrating emoji delivery into their business models. Check out these four other companies who are encouraging consumers to stay where they are and order their food without any words at all.
1. Domino's Pizza
Want a pizza? Look no further than your emoji keyboard: At Domino's, you can order a pizza by Tweeting a pizza emoji. The chain will send out the default pizza you've saved to the profile linked to your phone number.
2. Fooji
Fooji, which launched in June, works similarly to Domino's delivery, except the company picks from a wide variety of restaurants from where you can get your food. To use it, first link Fooji with your Twitter account. Then, anytime you tweet a food emoji, the company will select a local restaurant that serves the kind of food you requested and deliver it to your door. Unfortunately Fooji doesn't give you any say in selecting a restaurant or customizing a meal, so only try this one if you're feeling very adventurous.
3. BurgerBurger
If you live in London, you may have heard of BurgerBurger which popped up on National Burger Day in late August. It let you order burgers, fries, and beer from a variety of different restaurants around town to any address of your choosing. It was part of a hackathon project, so unfortunately it was only around for a brief amount of time — but we can always dream that it'll come back soon.
4. Innocent Drinks
A pop-up bar in London called Innocent Drinks took orders via emoji only during the launch of their new coconut water drinks on Aug. 11. They asked customers to post a photo of themselves to Instagram and hashtag it with the emoji corresponding to the cocktail they wanted — for example, a pink virgin mojito was shown as the angel emoji, the palm tree emoji, the water droplet emoji, the watermelon emoji, and a martini glass. It's a cool idea, but perhaps a little too complicated for those of us who get drunk early in the night.
Images: Emojipedia; Giphy (4)
