How Water Loss Hit a Leading Hotel Brand

The Challenge

Managing water networks in the UK is a vast challenge. When you consider that water companies in the UK are responsible for managing 215,277 miles of pipes, it’s no surprise more than one trillion litres of water was lost to leaky pipes in England and Wales in 2021-22 alone, according to provisional data from water sector regulator Ofwat.

For the hospitality industry, even a short-term water outage can rapidly force closure, negatively affecting reputation and cause escalating financial impact. With no access to bathing and leisure facilities and kitchens forced to close, with prolonged outage usually meaning closure is the only option.

Surprisingly, many hotel brands are amongst the estimated two/thirds of UK businesses with no water contingency plan in place. In this example, one of this hotel brand’s luxury 28-storey London properties with 453 guest rooms, three world-class restaurants, and extensive event and conference facilities experienced complete water loss overnight.

A local water outage meant that guests paying an average of £400 per room, per night would wake up to no toilet and bathing facilities, closed restaurants, and cancelled conferences and events. In a matter of hours, the lost business alone could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Business customers are responsible for their own water supply in an outage

With no documented site-specific emergency plan for water in place, when the water supply was cut off in the middle of the night, overnight staff had no idea what actions to take. They contacted their water retailer for assistance, who pointed them to Water Direct. We were able to mobilise a tanker the same working day, but the story doesn’t end there.

Because interruption to the water supply had not been considered within the organisation’s site specific emergency plan’, an uncoordinated approach meant that another member of staff was desperately calling around trying to find emergency water tankers, unaware tankers were already on route. They called Water Direct after a Google search, and the team was able to reassure them.

In the absence of a documented site specific emergency plan for water and assured response contract, the hotel had the added stress of pulling together multiple credit cards to make an advance payment for emergency water delivery.

Had the scenario taken place during a prolonged extreme weather incident or when contract demand was high, it may not have been possible for Water Direct to attend the site as swiftly as it did.

We’ll help you ensure a WaterTight response

Water Direct’s market leading WaterTight site specific emergency plan leaves nothing to chance. Our experts will collaborate with you to plan for every eventuality (even the ones you may not have considered) and conduct comprehensive site audits to create a robust, WaterTight site specific emergency plan for water. You’ll be backed up by one of the country’s largest dedicated drinking water tanker fleets and the UK’s Nationwide Bottled Water Bank, with quality assured stock of millions of litres of bottled drinking water, located strategically across the UK to ensure rapid response.

We’re here to help your business plan for unplanned changes to the normal water supply. Talk to one of our WaterTight team to find out more.