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I travel a lot around Africa on business and I'm coming to understand that running chillers for central air conditioning is a very major overhead for hotels, so it is only the top hotels in very hot countries that can afford to run proper air conditioning. Others will switch off the chillers to save money or don't have them at all so the fan will just blow unheated air out of the vents to give an illusion of cooling. In the end I guess it comes down to a balance between the cost of running the chillers and the cost of business lost thanks to complaints and bad reports on Tripadvisor etc. This is not confined to hot countries - I slept for only two torrid hours in a hotel in Manchester last week before giving up and opening the window (at least it could be opened - many can't) and lying cool but fully awake listening to street noise. Now I'm trying to find a mid-priced hotel in Budapest (Pest riverside) with proper AC as it will be hot in May/June when I plan to go.
So what proportion of an hotel's overheads can be expected to be spent on running the AC?
I guess split ACs are cheaper because once bought and installed they can be switched off when the room is out of use. But in terms of cooling the entire building and its contents they must be less efficient than central AC running full time, surely?
Can't help with much detail but am currently working on three four hotel schemes where we're using a crude rule of thumb of utilities costs coming in between 3% and 4% of turnover. It sounds arbitrary but generally shakes down about right. These schemes are UK and US BTW.