Hotel water cycle survey-Results
In order to establish an overview of the current water situation of tourist establishments in the Mediterranean area, a demEAUmed survey (Hotel Water Cycle) was created. The survey aimed at gathering information about the water cycle in these facilities. It consisted of three parts: Part A - general information of the establishment, Part B - core questions about the water infrastructure and methods of dealing with the wastewaters, and Part C - questions about environmental awareness of the respondents. The survey was provided in 10 languages: Albanian, Arabic, Croatian, English, French Greek, Italian, Slovenian, Spanish and Turkish.
The survey was launched online in July 2014 and by December 2014 the link to the survey was e-mailed to 5269 hotels. Since the response was very low, an outbound call centre was hired to contact tourist facilities directly. However, despite all efforts, the project succeeded in collecting 73 responses only (Fig. x left). Nevertheless, based on basic characteristics of responding hotels, e.g. category (Fig. x middle), size (Fig.x right), presence or absence of pools, it was concluded that the collected responses can be considered a representative sample of Mediterranean hotels.
| Figure x: Respondents of demEAUmed Hotel Water Cycle Survey (Part A) | ||
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Detailed results of the responses will be presented in a publication following the analysis of the survey; however, some common conclusions can be made.
As expected, most frequent water source is municipal network. For the most, hotels monitor water consumption of the entire establishment, and have at least 1 water saving device installed. All hotels having pools | spa apply some sort of water treatment, conventional approach being the most popular one. In cases when separation of grey and black water is carried out, it is done so for the ease of disposal into municipal sewerage. Only rare hotels treat (part of ) waste water on own premises for reuse purposes.
Tourism highly depends on water resources, which are in some Mediterranean areas rather limited. It therefore comes as no surprise that the vast majority of respondents are very environmentally aware and are either already improving their water infrastructure or willing to do so in the future. This shows great potential for implementation of new water treatment technologies that are being demonstrated and investigated in demEAUmed project.
demEAUmed project would like to thank all the hotels who contributed to publish this study! The hotels who declared an interest in keeping links with demEAUmed project are listed below:
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No 619116.