Project Description
Tourism is a growing business in the world, which requires big numbers of freshwater in its facilities and services (Charara et al., 2011). With emerging water issues in popular tourism destinations, it is important that water consumption is managed adequately, and in order to do so it is important to know in what ways the water is used exactly. Until now, most research has focussed on the water that is used on site at the tourism destination, but the water that is used during the production of certain goods and services that are consumed at the tourism destination remains inadequately understood. This study tries to fill a gap in the literature by researching the water that is used for the production of food that is consumed at a hotel. It does this by making a first attempt at applying the Water Footprint methodology, introduced by Hoekstra and Hung (2002), to a hotel situated in The Netherlands. Two approaches were tested and resulted to show a good representation of the overall water footprint of the hotel’s food consumption. However, difficulties were encountered which should be overcome, and improvements should be made to use this methodology in future research.
Author: A. Vos (2017)