Hospitality sector review urges licensing overhaul and fee cuts as ministers weigh 24 recommendations
A government review into Aotearoa New Zealand's hospitality sector has found businesses are paying too many fees and struggling with licensing processes that are opaque and slow, with 24 recommendations now on the table for ministers to consider.
The review, launched by the Ministry for Regulation in the previous year, examined how restaurants, bars, clubs, cafés, market food stalls, food trucks, catering businesses and hotels interact with regulators including councils. Its findings, released this week, paint a picture of a sector burdened by overlapping and outdated regulatory structures.
Among the 24 recommendations, the review proposes moving some hospitality businesses to a lower-risk regulatory category, scrapping annual or bi-annual licence renewals, introducing a nationally standardised application form, and appointing a new steward for the alcohol regulatory system. It also recommends reviewing building consent exemption conditions for temporary marquees — a long-standing irritant for event operators.
On alcohol licensing specifically, the review calls for removing the current licence types and replacing them with a single coherent risk framework. It also recommends repealing the Hotel Association of New Zealand Act 1969, a piece of legislation dating back more than half a century that the review identifies as no longer fit for purpose.
Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston described the sector as a $21.4 billion industry employing more than 193,000 people across the country. Upston said she will develop a Hospitality Action Plan to provide a coordinated framework for priority hospitality initiatives across government. The government's ministerial release, titled "Industry roadmap to help hospitality succeed," was published on the Beehive website on 3 September.
Regulation Minister David Seymour said the hospitality sector was hit hard by Covid and that red tape and "dumb rules" had made it difficult for the sector to bounce back. Seymour said ministers would be deciding which of the review's recommendations to accept in the coming weeks, giving no indication of a specific timeframe or which recommendations were likely to be prioritised.
The review's release follows the publication of the Hospitality Summit Report 2026, titled "Serving Success," released jointly by the Restaurant Association of New Zealand and Hospitality New Zealand on 4 September. That report sets out recommendations from the industry's own perspective on policy and regulation, separate from but running alongside the government's review process.
The Ministry for Regulation first flagged the hospitality review in October 2025, when it announced its intention to find and cut unnecessary red tape and modernise rules for the sector. The review covered the full breadth of hospitality operations, from sole-operator food trucks to large hotel complexes, and looked at every touchpoint where those businesses interact with central and local government regulators.
The scale of the proposed changes is considerable. Replacing the existing alcohol licence types with a single risk framework would require legislative amendment, as would repealing the Hotel Association of New Zealand Act 1969. Introducing a nationally standardised application form would need coordination across all territorial authorities, each of which currently administers its own licensing processes under the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012. The proposal for a new alcohol regulatory system steward would establish a role that does not currently exist in the regulatory architecture.
The recommendation to move some businesses to a lower-risk category reflects a risk-based approach already embedded in parts of the food safety system, where food businesses are classified according to the level of risk their operations pose. Extending that logic to hospitality licensing more broadly would mean businesses facing less frequent or lighter-touch oversight depending on their risk profile, rather than a one-size-fits-all regime.
Scrapping annual or bi-annual licence renewals would, if accepted, remove a recurring administrative cost and compliance burden for operators — though the review does not specify what oversight mechanism would replace renewals as a checkpoint for ongoing compliance.
Upston's Hospitality Action Plan is positioned as the vehicle through which the government would coordinate its response to the review's recommendations alongside other hospitality-related work streams across agencies. No timeline for the action plan has been given.
The industry's own "Serving Success" report provides a parallel set of recommendations reflecting what operators themselves see as the priority reforms. The convergence of a government-commissioned review and an industry-led summit report within the same week signals a degree of alignment between officials and sector bodies on the need for structural change, though the two documents were produced independently.
For operators, the practical stakes are straightforward. A café owner dealing with multiple council fees, a hotel navigating an antiquated licensing statute, or a marquee operator caught in building consent requirements all face costs and delays that the review identifies as unnecessary. Whether those costs are reduced will depend on which of the 24 recommendations Cabinet accepts, and on the legislative and regulatory machinery that follows.
Seymour's indication that decisions are weeks away, rather than months, suggests the government intends to move relatively quickly on at least some of the review's proposals. What those proposals look like once they pass through the Cabinet process and into legislative drafting is a separate question, and one the sector will be watching closely.
