Carly Hunt - Showerkap
About the Guest Carly Hunt is the Head of Strategic Partnerships 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, Head of Strategic Partnerships 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 Hotels use up to eight times more water per person than local residents , with some rooms consuming up to 1,500 litres per day — making demand reduction in hospitality a high-leverage intervention. Showerkap's pilot at the Sandman Hotel, Gatwick, achieved a 58% reduction in shower water usage and cut energy consumption by 14%, with average shower times dropping from 35+ minutes to under three and a half minutes. The technology's payback period is approximately two years , making it financeable against