If you operate multiple hospitality sites, you’ll know that no two locations are exactly the same. But when one hotel, pub or restaurant is using significantly more water than another, do you know why? Water benchmarking can help you find out.
By comparing water consumption across your hospitality estate, you can identify unusual patterns, highlight sites that may need attention and uncover opportunities to reduce both water usage and costs.
What Is Water Benchmarking?
Water benchmarking is the process of comparing water consumption across your sites to understand how each location is performing. For a hospitality business with multiple locations, simply looking at the total amount of water used doesn’t always tell you very much. A large hotel will naturally use more water than a small restaurant, for example. Instead, water consumption can be considered alongside relevant operational factors such as:
- Number of bedrooms.
- Occupancy levels.
- Number of covers.
- Floor area.
- Site type.
- Trading levels.
- Comparable locations within your estate.
This can give you a much clearer picture of how efficiently individual sites are using water.
Why Is Water Benchmarking Important For Multi-Site Hospitality Businesses?
When you manage dozens – or even hundreds – of hospitality locations, it can be difficult to know which sites are performing as expected and which require further investigation.
Benchmarking allows you to look across your estate and quickly identify outliers.
If several similar restaurants are using broadly comparable amounts of water but one location is consuming considerably more, there could be a reason worth investigating. It could be a hidden leak. It could be inefficient equipment. There could be an issue with meter readings or billing data. Or the site may simply have opportunities to use water more efficiently. Without benchmarking, these differences can be much harder to spot.
Water Benchmarking Can Help Identify Leaks and Unusual Consumption
Water leaks aren’t always obvious.
A leak can continue unnoticed for weeks or months, particularly at busy hospitality sites where teams are understandably focused on customers and day-to-day operations. Regularly monitoring and benchmarking consumption can make unusual increases easier to identify.
If a site’s consumption suddenly moves outside its normal range, or becomes significantly higher than comparable sites, that provides a reason to investigate further. Identifying the issue sooner could prevent unnecessary water consumption and avoid costs continuing to build.
Use Water Data To Prioritise The Right Sites
One of the biggest benefits of benchmarking a large hospitality estate is that it helps you decide where to focus your attention first. Rather than trying to investigate every location at once, benchmarking can help highlight the sites where there may be the greatest opportunity.
You can use the data to identify:
- Sites with unusually high consumption.
- Locations where consumption has increased.
- Sites performing significantly differently from comparable locations.
- Potential candidates for water audits or leak investigations.
- High-performing sites whose practices could potentially be replicated elsewhere.
This allows facilities, sustainability and operational teams to take a more targeted approach.
Benchmarking Can Help Reduce Your Water Costs
Reducing unnecessary water consumption doesn’t just reduce the amount of water you buy.
Depending on your site’s charges, reducing consumption may also lower associated wastewater costs. There can also be wider savings where water needs to be heated, pumped or otherwise used as part of an operational process. Across one location, an improvement might appear relatively small.
Across a hospitality estate of 50, 100 or 500 sites, however, those improvements can add up. That’s why benchmarking is particularly useful for larger multi-site operators: it allows you to look beyond individual bills and understand the bigger picture across your portfolio.
Measure Water Efficiency Improvements Over Time
Benchmarking isn’t only about finding problems.
It can also help you understand whether the changes you’re making are delivering results.
If you’ve introduced water-saving equipment, changed operating procedures or addressed high consumption at particular locations, ongoing benchmarking allows you to compare performance before and after those changes.
It also provides a stronger foundation for setting realistic water reduction targets and tracking progress across your hospitality estate.
Your Water Broker Should Help You Understand Consumption, Not Just Price
For multi-site hospitality businesses, managing water effectively should go beyond negotiating a competitive retail contract.
As a specialist business water broker working with the hospitality sector, we can help you look at the data behind your water bills and understand what’s happening across your estate.
By benchmarking consumption between sites, we can help identify unusual usage, highlight locations that may require further investigation and uncover potential opportunities to reduce water consumption and cost.
Because when you have a large portfolio of hospitality sites, knowing where to look can be just as important as knowing what you’re paying.