The hospitality industry has a plastic problem, and guests have noticed.
A single 200-room hotel at full capacity can burn through roughly 300,000 pieces of single-use plastic per month. That includes everything from mini shampoo bottles to the water bottles left on nightstands. Major chains like Marriott and Hilton are racing to set single-use plastic reduction targets. States like New York have passed laws banning mini plastic toiletry bottles in hotels entirely. Hotels that don’t adapt risk falling behind on ESG benchmarks, losing bookings from sustainability-minded travelers, and running into tightening regulations.
One of the easiest, most visible sustainability wins a hotel can make? Upgrade from bottled water to something better.
The Low-Hanging Fruit Nobody’s Picking Fast Enough
Water bottles are everywhere in hotels. Lobby fridges, gym coolers, conference tables, and guest rooms. They’re cheap per unit but expensive in aggregate, and the logistics of ordering, stocking, and disposing of thousands of plastic bottles every month add up fast.
And here’s the part that should bother hotel operators: most guests don’t actually want those bottles. They reach for them because they don’t trust the tap in an unfamiliar building, not because they prefer plastic. Travelers are wary of old pipes, unfamiliar water sources, and whatever might be lurking between the municipal supply and the faucet in their room. The bottled water is a workaround, not a preference. Booking.com’s 2021 sustainable travel report found that 43% of global travelers brought their own reusable water bottle on vacation specifically to avoid buying plastic. They’re showing up at your property ready to refill, but are you giving them somewhere to do it?
FloWater’s Refill Stations solve both problems at once. They connect directly to a property’s existing water line and run tap water through a 7x Advanced Purification process that removes up to 99.9% of contaminants, including PFAS, microplastics, lead, chlorine, and pharmaceuticals. The water comes out chilled, alkalized, and enhanced with electrolytes and in blind taste tests, 9 out of 10 people preferred it over bottled water.
With FloWater, guests get water they can trust, without the plastic. Hotels eliminate the procurement cycle entirely.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Miraval Arizona Resort & Spa hands every guest a reusable water bottle at check-in and has FloWater Refill Stations throughout the property. The program has become part of their brand story around mindful living. Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, and Hyatt are also among FloWater’s hospitality partners.
FloWater crossed the one billion bottles saved mark in late 2024, with over 12,000 locations across hotels, schools, gyms, and workplaces. Each station tracks bottles saved on a built-in counter, giving properties real-time data they can feed into ESG reporting, on-site signage, or guest communications. That kind of visible, measurable impact is exactly what sustainability officers and investors are looking for.
Why It Matters for ESG
Waste reduction, especially single-use plastics, is one of the areas CBRE has identified as “low-hanging fruit” for hotel ESG strategies. It’s tangible, measurable, and it resonates with guests. Booking.com’s 2024 sustainable travel report found that 75% of global travelers want to travel more sustainably over the next year. And a Hilton survey of 72,000 guests found that a third research a hotel’s environmental practices before booking, with that number jumping to 44% among guests under 25.
A water refill station won’t single-handedly get a property to net zero. But it checks multiple boxes at once: waste reduction, supply chain simplification, cost savings on bottled water procurement, and a guest-facing amenity that communicates your values without a pamphlet.
So Why Wait?
Hotels spend real money buying, shipping, refrigerating, and disposing of bottled water. FloWater eliminates that entire cycle and replaces it with purified water on tap that guests actually prefer. ESG reporting is becoming mandatory. Guests are paying attention. The hotels that move early on this stuff tend to be the ones setting the standard, not scrambling to catch up.
