Characterization of hotels and bathing establishments water uses for understanding urban demand in touristic cities

The touristic factor has not been adequately addressed in urban water demand studies, so far, and it is often neglected also by the water utilities. In a beach resort, where the water demand drastically increases during the summer months, a better understanding of the touristic uses would substantially contribute to improving the management of the available water supplies, already scarce during the dry season.

The present study contributes to the quantification of the water demand in touristic activities, analysing the single-consumer volumes of more than a thousand accommodation facilities (hotels and apartment hotels) and two hundred bathing establishments in Rimini, the most important coastal destination in Italy. For each user, the estimated monthly water volumes have been collected and validated, and the seasonal patterns analysed for an observation period of twelve years.

Each hotel and bathing establishment was characterised identifying the main attributes that may drive the water demand. The consumer volumes are put into relation with the hotel size, identified by the number of rooms, and the influence of the hotel category and of the presence of water-demanding services (such as swimming pool or spa, garden to be irrigated, restaurant) is analysed. For the bathing establishments, the number of beach umbrellas identify the number of expected costumers and some specific services are used as additional features to interpret the variability of the water consumptions.

The analysis identifies the features that have more influence on the water consumption patterns for hotels and bathing establishments. This kind of study allows to infer the behaviour of similar users, in order to estimate the expected patterns, as a function of the specific attributes of the touristic activity. Such benchmarks would also allow to check if the actual consumer volumes are in line with the typical ones, highlighting possible malfunctioning of the metering system or anomalous consumptions that would prompt an in-depth analysis of the water-uses in the hotel or bathing establishment premises.