18 February 2025

Hon. Louise Upston
Minister for Tourism and Hospitality
Parliament Buildings
Wellington
l.upston@ministers.govt.nz

Tēnā koe Minister Upston,

Congratulations and welcome to the Tourism and Hospitality portfolio

On behalf of the Restaurant Association of New Zealand, I want to express our gratitude for meeting with us on day one of your tenure as Minister for Tourism and Hospitality. I have already had feedback from our members who shared how impressed they were by your commitment to engaging with the hospitality sector so soon into taking on this role, and I look forward to meeting with you again soon.

With that in mind, I am writing to invite you to Ignite Hospo 2025, our new-look hospitality conference, and to share with you some information about our industry advisory groups, as well as how we intersect with your Social Development and Employment portfolio.

Ignite Hospo 2025

Ignite Hospo is the new format for our annual hospitality conference. This immersive event will go beyond the traditional conference format and off er intimate workshops that provoke thought and discussion through discovery, exploration, and debate of both new and time-tested business strategies and concepts.

As Minister for Tourism and Hospitality, we would like to invite you to be a keynote speaker at Ignite, which will take place on Monday 19 May at the Hyundai Marine Sports Centre, 8/10 Tamaki Drive, Okahu Bay, Auckland.

With the 2025 budget being delivered on Thursday 22 May, should you wish to use this occasion to make a pre-budget announcement of any hospitality-specific investments in Budget 2025, we would be more than happy to support and facilitate this with your off ice.

Industry Advisory Groups

To better consider the issues, initiatives and future skills needed across the hospitality industry, the Restaurant Association has established five industry advisory groups to facilitate regular dialogue about hospitality needs that builds more cohesive, coordinated insights and support greater decision-making.

The groups are:

• Immigration and Employment Relations Industry Advisory Group
• Economic Development Industry Advisory Group
• Sustainability and Environmental Practise Industry Advisory Group
• Training and Development Skills Industry Advisory Group Page 1 of 2
• Rangatahi Advisory Group

These groups meet quarterly in a think tank-style online meeting to discuss issues, ideas and initiatives to support the growth and development of the hospitality industry. Should you or your colleagues ever wish to meet with one of these groups, or engage in targeted consultation on specific topics, we would welcome the opportunity to coordinate such engagement as we have done in the past with the Commerce Commission.

Intersection with your other portfolios

In partnership with the Ministry of Social Development, our HospoStart programme introduces jobseekers to the basics of hospitality. They graduate with a great attitude, core skills and ready for a career in hospitality.

We train job-seekers over four weeks to ready them for work (or get them back into work) in hospitality, with an overall goal of employment upon completion. The training provided by the Restaurant Association is employer driven and has been created in consultation with the hospitality industry.

Participants gain valuable insight into a career in hospitality and key skills for entering employment and further education in our industry. We designed this course to reflect the key skill set required for job seekers – it is practical and hands on learning.

Upon completion we actively help to recruit the graduates into employment and our programme will continue in the form of pastoral care and mentorship in the first 3 months of their employment. Since its establishment in 2017, more than 900 people have passed through the programme and onto the hospitality industry.

Bringing the Michelin Guide to New Zealand

Finally, I understand you have requested a briefing on Michelin, and we were happy to provide what information we had available to your off icials to support this. If there is anything we can do to assist you in this work, please let us know — we are very excited by this opportunity, and have a number of members who have trained in Michelin-starred venues and received Michelin stars themselves who I’m sure would welcome the opportunity to help with bringing Michelin to New Zealand.

I hope you have found this briefing useful, and I look forward to working with you to grow the value of hospitality in New Zealand. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance in your role.

Ngā mihi nui,
Marisa Bidois
Chief Executive
Restaurant Association of New Zealand

Friday 24 January 2025

Hon. Nicola Willis
Minister for Economic Growth
Parliament Buildings
Wellington
n.willis@ministers.govt.nz

Tēnā koe Minister Willis,

Cooking with gas: supporting economic growth in the Hospitality industry

I want to take this opportunity to congratulate you for taking on the new Economic Growth portfolio, and thank you for your work to date across all of your portfolios. I particularly appreciated the opportunity to support your announcement of changes to the rules regarding working from home for public servants, and I hope to continue that relationship in your new role.

At the outset, I wanted to outline the Restaurant Association’s role within the broader hospitality industry, which can be thought of as being made up of three sectors: food and beverage, accommodation, and entertainment. The Restaurant Association is the largest representative body focusing on the food and beverage sector of hospitality; our more than 2,500 members cover the length and breadth of the country and are primarily businesses where food is the hero of their operations – from some of the most renowned restaurants in the country to the casual food truck at a local weekend market, we advocate for them all.

It is in that capacity that I wanted to bring to your attention two opportunities that would significantly raise the hospitality sector’s contribution to New Zealand’s economic growth: bringing the Michelin guide onshore, and a focus on major events.

Bringing the Michelin guide to New Zealand

This would provide a significant boost to the food and beverage sector of the hospitality industry, as well as our culinary tourism off ering as a country. Michelin-starred establishments can often become tourism destinations in their own right, generating and raising up a local economy around them. Anecdotally, we’re even aware of small towns and villages across Europe that have seen substantial increases in visitor numbers after local restaurants have earned a Michelin-star.

While the exact cost of bringing the Michelin guide to New Zealand is usually determined through formal negotiations, it is not uncommon for the guide to be in some financial agreement with tourism boards and international governments to initiate market entry, and we are preparing to engage directly with Michelin to better understand their requirements to enter New Zealand.

What we do know is that Michelin has been travelling further afield of late to launch inaugural country guides around the world. From publicly available reporting, cost approximations to bring the Michelin guide onshore have included 1.5 million euro ($2.7 million NZD) for Tel Aviv, 3.2 billion won over four years ($3.9 million NZD) for South Korea and 144 million baht over five years ($7 million NZD) for Thailand.

Recognising that the up-front cost of attracting Michelin to New Zealand could be a concern for the Government, we are also liaising with the Restaurant and Catering Association in Australia to work together on a trans-Tasman proposal to bring Michelin to both of our countries, in the hopes of agreeing to an arrangement with Australia to ensure that both markets can share both the costs and benefits of Michelin, and avoid one country winning out over the other.

Major events and infrastructure

I have heard from many of our members that they are particularly interested in the Government’s approach to major events, particularly in response to an article published by Stuff on 14 October. In response, I have written to your colleague Dr. Carlos Cheung to express our support for his members’ bill (the Resource Management (Concerts) Amendment Bill) which would ensure that consent authorities must grant on application a minimum of 15 consents per year, per major stadium, for concerts.

We see this as a significant step forward for major stadia across the country, however, we also recognise that live music and stadium tours alone are not the solution to all of our challenges. As such, I would value an opportunity to meet with you to learn more about your plans for the economic growth portfolio, both with regard to major events, but also to identify potential synergies which could be accelerated by partnering with hospitality.

I would be happy to host you at our Head Off ice in Mt Eden, to meet with you in Wellington, or to meet online should that be most convenient. Appreciating the pressures on your schedule which may make a meeting diff icult to schedule, I look forward to hearing about your priorities for the Economic Growth portfolio over the coming weeks as relevant announcements are made.

While the past few years — marked by the pandemic, natural disasters and economic uncertainty — have wreaked havoc on the hospitality industry, we are optimistic about what 2025 will bring. Our businesses are preparing for a busy year ahead, with the adage “thrive in ‘25” being adopted by many as a sign of hope for the year ahead.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance to you in the meantime, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Ngā mihi nui,
Marisa Bidois
Chief Executive
Restaurant Association of New Zealand