About the Guest

Carly Hunt is the CEO of Showerkap, a UK-based water technology company tackling excessive water consumption in the hospitality sector. With over 20 years in hotel management — latterly focused on energy, waste, and water reduction programmes — Carly brings rare operational depth to the sustainability challenge she's now helping to solve. Her academic background in sustainable tourism (the subject of her university dissertation) makes her return to this space something of a full-circle moment.

Episode Summary

Water scarcity might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you book a hotel room, but it probably should be. In this episode of Shape the System, host Vincent Turner sits down with Carly Hunt, CEO of Showerkap, to explore how the hospitality industry is one of the heaviest — and least scrutinised — consumers of fresh water on the planet. Hotels can use up to eight times more water than local residents, with individual rooms consuming as much as 1,500 litres per day. Meanwhile, the UK's Environment Agency is forecasting a potential shortfall of 1.4 billion litres per day by 2030, rising to 5 billion by 2050. The numbers are stark, and Carly makes the case that demand reduction — not just supply management — has to be part of the answer.

Carly's entry into this space came through two decades of hotel management, where she discovered that energy and waste were relatively easy to monitor and reduce, but water was almost impossible to measure at any meaningful resolution. That gap led her to Showerkap, the brainchild of inventor Steve Harding, which combines three elements that have never previously been integrated in the water sector: fixture-level IoT monitoring across an entire building, a cloud-based analytics platform, and a novel shower fade timer that delivers a real-time behavioural nudge — without restricting flow.

The pilot results, run across one floor of the Sandman Hotel at Gatwick Airport, were striking. Prior to the intervention, guests were showering for 35 minutes or more — consuming around 245 litres per session. After the shower fade timer was introduced (set to seven minutes), average shower duration across the 20-room eco-floor dropped to just three minutes and 20 seconds. Overall water usage fell by 58%, energy use by 14%, and the projected saving across the full hotel is approximately 2.7 million litres per year. Of the guests who stayed across nearly a year of the pilot, only three declined to participate in the eco-floor — a participation rate that Carly and Vincent calculate at roughly 99%.

The commercial case is deliberately straightforward: Showerkap is targeting a two-year payback period, meaning hotels can effectively finance the installation against the savings it generates. Beyond the headline water and energy savings, the technology surfaces hidden operational value — the Sandman pilot uncovered hot water circulation issues throughout the building and enabled early detection of Legionella risk. The go-to-market strategy currently leans on pilots and case studies to build trust in a space where water has historically been undervalued, with an eye toward expansion into the Mediterranean, MENA, and other water-scarce markets. An upcoming back-of-house research piece, potentially in partnership with the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, is expected to extend Showerkap's evidence base well beyond the bathroom.

Key Takeaways

Notable Quotes

"Water is one of the most vital resources on earth. And we all know that. And we rarely treat it that way because we automatically run a tap and it's there." — Carly Hunt

"Reducing showers by just a couple of minutes can save 20 litres. And if those small actions become millions, then think of the impact that would have." — Carly Hunt

"We always say that water intrinsically is linked to everything. We can't do anything without water." — Carly Hunt

"We don't want to force anyone to change, because that doesn't work. You have to effectively give them the tools to actually do it themselves." — Carly Hunt

"It's not everyone's fault. We just can't — we've never been able to measure it and we've never been able to value it properly." — Carly Hunt

Resources

Shape the System is  an independent podcast with support from KPMG High Growth Ventures

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