Project Description
The European Mediterranean is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, with increasing numbers of international tourist arrivals every year in many places. However, this region is also sensitive to droughts & freshwater shortages, especially in summer, which collides with its tourism high season. As tourism is a water-demanding industry, a growth in tourist numbers increases the stress on freshwater resources around the destination. Therefore, it is important to get a better understanding of how water is used in this region’s tourism sector. Accommodation accounts for a large part of the total amount of freshwater used by tourists and hotels are still the most popular form of accommodation. The focus of this research is therefore on how hotels use freshwater and what factors can be influential to the decision-making process about this usage. To identify & organize these factors, the PESTEL model is used as a conceptual framework. A literature study & a case study on Rimini, Italy, are conducted to get insights on water use in hotels and to see what factors were identified as influential by the existing literature and by the hotels themselves, after which the results of the two studies are compared and analyzed.
Author: L. Bron (2019)