INTERNATIONAL REPORT—Water is a utility cost that is tied to nearly every operational process in a hotel, from guestrooms and kitchens to cooling towers, laundry, and landscaping. The way properties track and account for water consumption may differ and so can the accuracy of the data.
The 12th Revised Edition of the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI) changes that. Through its new Energy, Water, and Waste (EWW) schedule, hotels are now required to report both cost and consumption of water as part of their financial statements.
Why Water Reporting Matters in Hospitality
Water use directly affects operating costs, asset efficiency, and environmental performance. Standardized reporting under USALI 12 brings structure to this area of operations that is prone to inconsistency, making water data comparable across departments and properties.
Accurate water data helps hotels understand true consumption patterns, identify inefficiencies, and manage rising utility costs. For investors and owners, it also provides a common reporting language that aligns financial and operational performance on water, which is a growing focus as water scarcity risk rises globally.
Water data also helps hotels understand risk. Water scarcity, drought, and infrastructure stress are already affecting many markets. These conditions can disrupt operations and directly impact guest experience through low water pressure, restricted amenities, or service interruptions. Reliable data allows teams to see where properties are vulnerable and plan accordingly. Without consistent water data, it is difficult to link daily water use to risk management, resilience planning, and long-term asset performance.
What’s Covered Under the USALI Water Account
The Water section of the EWW schedule replaces and expands the earlier utilities framework. It includes:
- Water: Municipal or Other Sources—purchased water from public utilities and alternative sources such as wells, harvested rainwater, and reclaimed or treated water.
- Sewer—costs associated with wastewater collection and treatment, typically billed alongside or as a percentage of water use.
Each of these accounts is reported in both financial terms (monetary cost) and operational terms (gallons or cubic meters). From these figures, standard intensity metrics are derived, including Water per Occupied Room, Water per Available Room and Water per Square Foot, to enable clearer performance insight. Water cost, consumption, and intensity each tell a different story about performance. Cost shows what a hotel pays, but consumption and intensity explain how water is actually being used and how efficiently a property operates. Looking at all three together provides a clearer, more accurate picture of water performance and risk.
Preparing & Managing Your Water Data
As with energy data, water reporting under USALI 12 depends on reliable, normalized, and well-documented information.
Common areas to review include:
- Align billing periods to financial months. Because utility billing cycles often differ from monthly accounting periods, data should be normalized so that reported usage matches the accounting month. Start by verifying start and end dates for each billing cycle.
- Check for shared or unmetered systems. In many hotels, irrigation, cooling towers, or pools may not be separately metered. Where estimates are used, document calculation methods and note any assumptions.
- Review invoice capture and entry accuracy. Small data-entry errors are common and can compound when aggregating results across properties. Establish a simple monthly review process to ensure completeness and accuracy.
- Verify units and conversions. Maintain consistency across suppliers and sites, particularly between gallons and cubic meters. Always confirm conversions before aggregating data for financial use.
- Keep complete documentation. Each reported figure should link back to a verified source, such as a utility bill, submeter log, or engineering record. Clear documentation ensures audit readiness and internal consistency.
Using Water Data Effectively
With these metrics in place, hotels can start using water data more strategically. For example, standardized reporting enables comparisons within a portfolio and supports benchmarking against datasets such as the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking (CHSB) Index. Analyzing water data trends also helps identify seasonal variances and opportunities to improve efficiency. Over time, this structure creates a stronger foundation for both operational decision-making and financial reporting.
About the Author:
Eric Ricaurte founded Greenview in 2008 as a boutique firm specializing in the metrics, measurement, and reporting of carbon and other sustainability performance indicators within hospitality and tourism. He is a frequent speaker, organizer, researcher, and generally ubiquitous character in the topic of sustainability measurement, leveraging nearly three decades of direct work in the field of sustainability.
Eric began his career canoeing people through the jungle in 1997. He spent 10 years working in ecotourism across Costa Rica, Mexico, and Brazil in operations and then as a consultant. Eric started out managing eco lodges and nature park operations, and then naïvely decided to go on his own as an independent consultant. Eric eventually built his client list to include hotels, parks, nature and cultural tour operators, receptive tour companies, and eventually destinations. During this time, his entrepreneurial ventures included co-owning a failed speedboat and outrigger canoeing tour business in Bahia, Brazil.
Throughout these formative years Eric spent plenty of time in forests and parks, and became fascinated with the concept of carbon sequestration for value it placed on nature, and the opportunities it provided for conservation as well as tourism. He started researching the topic in 2001 and won a student research award at Cornell University for his paper titled “Carbon Offsetting, Trading, and Sequestration and their Relation to Travel & Tourism.” Fast forward 10 years later, as a research fellow at Cornell, Eric authored the study “Developing a Sustainability Measurement Framework for Hotels: Toward an Industry-wide Reporting Structure” and was selected as the technical consultant to develop the Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative. Another 10 years later in 2021, he rallied industry bodies and dozens of hotel companies to develop a Net Zero Methodology for Hotels.
Throughout his career Eric has consulted globally for a wide range of organizations including several Fortune 500 companies across hospitality, tech, healthcare, real estate, with specialized travel industry experience including hotel companies; cruise lines; tour operators, attractions and mixed-use complexes; event organizers; destinations, and working with industry bodies including the American Hotel & Lodging Association, World Travel & Tourism Council, UN World Tourism Organization, US Green Building Council, and Joint Meetings Industry Council.
