Proposal of a Water Consumption Efficiency Indicator for the Hotel Sector

This work proposes a novel indicator (HCWI) for evaluating water consumption efficiency in hotels. The indicator is built as a relative index that compares the current water consumption with an estimated minimum achievable value. To ensure the representativeness and applicability of the index, the evaluation of this water consumption baseline considers each water consumption micro-component individually and has been simplified, so it only requires fundamental characteristics of the hotel and those that are easy to identify and quantify. A value of the HCWI equal to one indicates the best water use efficiency that can be theoretically achieved with the technology available. On the contrary, larger values of the HWCI indicate high levels of water use inefficiency by the hotel. The applicability of the indicator is tested in six different hotels located in a touristic region in the north of Spain.