Equality law - Hotels, restaurants, cafés and pubs

Equality law applies to any business that provides goods, facilities or services to members of the public.

This includes a wide range of different businesses and services. These include:

• hotels
• bed and breakfast establishments
• guest houses
• self-catering holidays
• hostels
• restaurants
• cafés
• bars and nightclubs
• public houses
• takeaway food establishments.

It doesn’t matter whether the service is free, for example, a takeaway food delivery service provided at no charge, or whether it must be paid for – it will still be covered by equality law.

First, use the list on page What equality law means for your business to make sure you know what equality law says you must do as a business providing goods, facilities or services to the public.

• You may need to work out if you are an association (which is what equality law calls some organisations that describe themselves as clubs) or a service provider.
• You need to avoid unlawful discrimination if you set conditions on who you serve and the terms and conditions on which you serve them.
• Because your service is likely to be provided at a particular place, you need to consider reasonable adjustments to your premises or to the way you deliver your services.

Even though you may describe yourself as a ‘club’ (and many clubs are what equality law calls associations), you are really a service provider if you are offering a service to any member of the public, for example, by:

• charging them an entry fee to watch an event
• allowing anyone to join your dining club provided they pay for the service
• even if the charge is described as a membership fee or if the service is free.

If you are not sure whether you are a service provider or an association, then ask yourself:

• do you have 25 or more members and is membership regulated by rules – for example, do all the members have to decide who becomes a new member?

If the answer to that is ‘yes’, then you should read the guide on associations instead.

It is possible to be both an association and a service provider.

If you are both an association and a service provider, the question you need to think about is whether your services are provided to the public or to your members or associate members and their guests or people who want to become members or guests.

If it is the public, then this is the right guide for you to read.

If it is your members, associate members or their guests or people who want to become members or guests, you should read the guide on associations instead. 

If you decide who to serve and who not to serve based on a protected characteristic, you risk discriminating against your customers.

You can still tell customers what standards of behaviour you want from them. However, sometimes how someone behaves may be linked to a protected characteristic.  

If you set standards of behaviour for your customers or clients which have a worse impact on people with a particular protected characteristic than on people who do not have that characteristic, you need to make sure that you can objectively justify what you have done. Otherwise, it will be indirect discrimination.

If you do set standards of behaviour, you must make reasonable adjustments to them for disabled people and avoid discrimination arising from disability.

If you run a hospitality business, you will need to make sure your premises are accessible to disabled people by making reasonable adjustments. You cannot wait until a disabled person wants to use your services, but must think in advance about what people with a range of impairments might reasonably need, such as people who have a visual impairment, a hearing impairment, a mobility impairment or a learning disability.

Reasonable adjustments are not just about physical accessibility, although this is important for some disabled people, but can be about the way in which services are offered.