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FCA FRN 724952 · Co. No. 07014570 · Bristol
§ Commercial insurance

Hospitality insurance - pubs, restaurants and venues

Apex Insurance Brokers · Last reviewed: June 2026

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, FRN 724952. Companies House 07014570. Cover availability and terms depend on insurer underwriting at the time of quotation.

This page is for the people running pubs, restaurants, hotels, B&Bs, cafés, takeaways, late-night venues and event spaces across Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, the Cotswolds and the wider South West. If you operate a wet-led pub on Stokes Croft, a gastropub in Clifton, a country-house hotel near Tetbury, a fish-and-chip shop in Weston-super-Mare or a wedding venue in Painswick, the cover you need rarely looks like what an online portal will sell you in five minutes.

Hospitality is one of the hardest commercial classes to place well in 2025–2026. Property rates have hardened materially since 2023, several insurers have withdrawn appetite for wet-led pubs and late-night venues, and chain-restaurant administrations keep dragging at the scheme markets. A typical claim is not exotic — a deep-fryer fire on a Friday night, an EHO closure after a contamination scare, a slip on a wet floor — but how those claims are paid (or refused) depends almost entirely on how the policy was put together at inception.

We are an independent commercial broker based in Bristol, working across the 50-mile catchment that takes in Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cardiff, Newport, Swindon, Taunton, Yeovil, Wells and the Cotswolds.

What hospitality insurance is

"Hospitality insurance" is not a single product. It is a package built around Material Damage, Business Interruption and a combined Liability section, layered with the extensions a particular trade actually needs: Loss of Licence for licensed premises, Loss of Attraction for venues tied to a wider festival or season, Money cover for cash-heavy operations, food contamination wording, glass, accidental damage on hotel furniture, residential contents above the pub, and cyber and PCI for any venue running a property management system or taking card payments at the table.

Below a certain size and complexity, an off-the-shelf SME product can work. A single-site coffee shop turning over £180,000 with no deep-fat frying and no alcohol licence will rate cleanly on a standard Aviva, Allianz, AXA or NIG package. The wheels come off once you add: gross room receipts, a late-licence past 23:00 under the Licensing Act 2003, deep-fat frying without Ansul or Amerex suppression, a thatched roof, a Grade II listing, residential above a commercial kitchen, multi-site operation, or annual gross receipts above roughly £750,000–£1m.

At that point you have moved out of the "fast-trade" portals into the part of the market that does not deal direct with the public. Premiums are calculated against gross receipts split between food, wet and accommodation, weighted by trading hours, EHO Food Hygiene Rating and construction. Underwriters expect a presentation: completed proposal, current loss runs, photos of kitchen and extraction ducting, electrical and gas certificates, fire risk assessment and evidence of staff training. We assemble that and put it in front of insurers who will actually quote — the specialist hospitality desks at NIG, RSA, Aviva Pub & Restaurant, Markel, Ecclesiastical (heritage and country-house), and Lloyd's where the risk is non-standard.

The broker's job in hospitality is to know which insurer wants which risk this quarter, to present the case honestly, and to argue the claim when it comes in. That is what gets a deep-fryer fire paid in full rather than reduced for an inadequate clean-down log.

The covers you actually need

The list below is what we would consider a complete hospitality programme. Not every venue needs every cover, but every venue needs to have made a deliberate decision about each one.

Material Damage

Building (where freehold), tenants' improvements (where you hold an FRI lease), fixtures, fittings, kitchen equipment, stock and external structures including smoking shelters, beer gardens, marquees and pergolas. Sums insured need to be on a reinstatement basis and reviewed annually — kitchen equipment in particular has risen sharply since 2021. Underinsurance is the single most common reason a hospitality claim is reduced; we push every client to a desktop valuation at least every three years and a full RICS reinstatement-cost assessment on any property over £1m sum insured.

Business Interruption

The cover that actually pays the bills after a fire. For hospitality, gross profit basis with an indemnity period of 18 to 24 months as standard, and 24 to 36 months for hotels, listed buildings, thatched property or any venue where rebuild and planning consent will realistically take more than a year. The 12-month default on many SME schemes is the biggest cause of under-paid hospitality claims. Wages should be on a 100% basis throughout, not stepped down at month three. Make sure denial of access and public utilities extensions are included.

Public and Products Liability

£5m is the floor; we place most hospitality at £10m, and £20m where a venue is tied into festival contracts, hotel group bookings or exclusive hire by corporate clients. Products Liability is where food-poisoning claims live — the wording must respond to allergen incidents (Natasha's Law) and to communicable disease where the policy allows. A typical bacillus cereus claim from improperly cooled rice sits on the Products section, not Public Liability.

Employers' Liability

£10m is statutory minimum and what most insurers offer. Wording matters more than limit — make sure agency and casual staff are covered and that the employee definition picks up trainees, work-experience placements and the under-18s most kitchens rely on at weekends.

Loss of Licence

A separate cover that pays out if the alcohol licence is revoked through no fault of the licensee. For tied tenants the loss is capped at lease value; for free-of-tie operators it can run to seven figures because the licence is what gives the building its value. Designated Premises Supervisor (DPS) trustee liability is a related cover where the DPS is held personally responsible for licence breaches.

Loss of Attraction / Loss of Trade

Particularly relevant in our region. A Cheltenham hotel dependent on Festival week, a Glastonbury B&B, a Cotswolds wedding venue tied to a particular church, or a Bristol harbourside restaurant trading off the Watershed footfall — all have a Loss of Attraction exposure. The cover responds when an insured peril damages a nearby attraction and your trade collapses even though your own building is undamaged. We push for a one-mile distance trigger rather than the 250-metre wording some insurers default to.

Money, Glass and Contents

Cash-heavy venues — late-night bars, takeaways, clubs — need realistic limits on premises and in transit. Most schemes default to a £2,500 in-safe limit, which is wildly insufficient for a Saturday bar that banks on Monday. Glass cover should include shopfront, internal partitioning, mirror walls, gantry glass and decorative glazing. Hotel and restaurant accidental damage on furniture and soft furnishings is where broken champagne flutes, ripped banquette seating and scorched tablecloths actually get paid.

Stock Deterioration and Personal Accident

Frozen and chilled stock in freezers, fridges and walk-ins — indicative limits from £5,000 for a single-site café to £50,000+ for a hotel with banqueting capacity. Power failure and breakdown of refrigeration are the key triggers. Personal Accident gives owner-operator cover for the licensee or chef-patron — a chef-patron sidelined six months with a knife or back injury is a genuine BI exposure the policy may not otherwise pick up.

Cyber and Engineering Inspection

Hotels running Opera, Mews or Cloudbeds hold meaningful guest data and card information; restaurants taking card payments through SumUp, Square, Dojo or Adyen sit within PCI-DSS scope. A ransomware event taking out the booking system at peak season is a six-figure BI claim before the data-breach response — see the commercial cyber hub. Engineering inspection covers statutory inspection of pressure vessels, coffee-machine steam boilers, lifts and LOLER-relevant lifting equipment in cellars; see engineering inspection.

Sector-specific risks we see most

Deep-fat fryer fires

The single most frequent serious property claim in hospitality, and the one underwriters scrutinise most closely. Industry experience suggests roughly one in seven fish-and-chip shops has a serious fryer fire over a five-year period; kebab houses and high-volume takeaways are not materially better. A typical claim: ducting cleaned only annually, grease build-up in the canopy, a flash fire in the pan that runs up the canopy and ignites the duct. Without Ansul, Amerex or equivalent wet-chemical suppression and a six-monthly TR19-compliant clean, you will struggle to place at sensible rates. We have placed risks where the only viable market was Lloyd's, with a £5,000 fire excess and a written warranty to install suppression within 60 days.

Food contamination, allergens and EHO closure

Bacillus cereus in cooked rice, campylobacter in undercooked poultry, norovirus traced to a wedding banquet — all standard exposures. Cover should respond on a Products Liability basis plus a food contamination extension picking up consequential BI from EHO closure. Natasha's Law means allergen labelling failures sit alongside the contamination exposure. A typical claim: a guest with a documented nut allergy is served a dish containing peanut oil, EHO investigates, the venue is closed for ten days, BI runs £40,000–£70,000 before any third-party settlement. Check the inner limit on the food contamination extension — £25,000 is common and usually too low.

Slips, trips and assault claims in late-night venues

Liability claims in pubs and bars cluster around two events: a slip on a wet floor and an injury from a fight or ejection by door staff. The slip claim is almost always defendable with proper cleaning records and signage; the assault claim is where it gets expensive, particularly if door staff are direct employees rather than SIA-licensed contractors. Make sure the policy carries no blanket assault exclusion, that any door-staff contractor holds £10m PL with you noted as a beneficiary, and that CCTV footage is retained for at least 31 days.

Storm, flood and escape of water

The South West has a real flood profile and hospitality property is disproportionately old, with copper pipework, cast-iron drainage and original plaster ceilings. Escape of water is now the most frequent property claim across the book, ahead of fire. Smart leak-detection (LeakBot, Grohe Sense, Aico) reduces frequency and we will negotiate premium for venues that install it.

Hardening market dynamics

Be honest about what 2023–2025 did to this class. Several mainstream insurers paused or restricted wet-led pub appetite. Late-night venues with music or dancing past 23:00 carry meaningful loadings, and some markets will not write them at all. Chain-restaurant administrations have spooked the schemes. Thatched, listed and former coaching-inn property sit in their own micro-market. None of this is permanent, but it is where rates sit going into 2026. We tell clients honestly when a renewal needs the full 60-day lead time, and when the answer is "this is the market — a switch will cost more than it saves."

Bristol & South West considerations

Bristol's hospitality estate is clustered and insurers price each cluster differently. The harbourside — Wapping Wharf, the Watershed, Harbourside, Welsh Back — is high-footfall with a mix of bars, restaurants and event venues; it sits within the Avon flood plain, and surface-water flood scores for some addresses are worse than postcode-average tools suggest. Cabot Circus and Park Street carry the standard late-licence loading. Stokes Croft, Gloucester Road and North Street Southville carry a heavy independent food and drink scene with creative-use buildings that often need bespoke property wording.

Bath is its own micro-market — Pulteney Street, George Street and Walcot Street restaurants, plus the Royal Crescent and country-house hotels in the surrounding villages — and heritage / Grade II specialists dominate the panel. Ecclesiastical and Markel see Bath repeatedly and price it sensibly when presented well.

Cheltenham has a defined surge BI exposure during Festival week (Gold Cup) — every hotel and serviced apartment in town runs at peak rate for four days, and a fire or flood event immediately before or during the Festival is a category of BI claim that needs specific consideration of indemnity period and gross profit basis. We have placed hotel risks where Festival-week revenue alone represents 15–20% of annual turnover.

The Cotswolds wedding-venue market — Tetbury, Painswick, Stroud, Cirencester, Castle Combe — has its own peculiarities: marquee cover, exclusive-hire wording, deposit-protection cover for couples, and Loss of Attraction tied to particular churches or registry offices.

Wells and Glastonbury see B&B and small-hotel surge demand during Festival week and the Christmas market; rooms sell out a year in advance and BI cover must respond if the building is unusable during those windows. Yeovil and Sherborne country-house hotels share a profile with the Cotswolds. The Bristol Channel coastal corridor — Clevedon, Portishead, Weston-super-Mare, Burnham-on-Sea — is weighted toward storm, coastal flood and a strong seasonal trading pattern the BI calculation must reflect.

How to get it right at renewal

Start 60–90 days out. Hospitality is one of the few classes where this is the difference between a sensible quote and a poor one — specialist insurers will not look at a submission that arrives ten days before renewal, and the market for wet-led, late-night or non-standard risks is small enough that being late means you take what is left.

The submission should include: completed proposal, current and prior-year accounts (or a credible forecast for newer venues), three years' claims experience from your incumbent (the official letter, not your own summary), gross receipts split food / drink / accommodation, trading hours, fire risk assessment, gas and electrical certificates, EHO Food Hygiene Rating, Ansul/Amerex service records, TR19 extraction clean records, fire and intruder alarm grades and monitoring (Red Care or dual-path preferred), CCTV coverage and retention period, SIA door staff arrangements, and colour photographs of frontage, kitchen, cellar, extraction canopy and any non-standard areas.

Loss runs matter. The gap between open and closed claims is what underwriters look at — three open claims at "estimate £10,000" each can drag premium more than three closed claims at £5,000 paid. We chase incumbents to update reserves and close reportable claims before we go to market.

Risk-management evidence is leverage. Suppression on the fryer line, extraction-fire suppression with current service records, a documented allergen procedure, IOSH-trained kitchen managers, staff allergen certificates, smart leak-detection — every one is a discount you can argue for, but only if you can show the certificates.

The managed-renewal timeline we run: 90 days out, gather documents; 75 days out, issue submission; 60 days out, initial terms; 45 days out, negotiate inner limits and warranties; 30 days out, present recommended terms; 14 days out, bind. This is the timeline underwriters themselves want — squeezing it into the last fortnight produces the rushed renewals we are brought in to fix.

On multi-quote approaches: sending the same hospitality risk to multiple brokers usually destroys it. Insurers will not quote twice on the same risk, and the first broker to register it locks the others out. If you want a market test, ask your incumbent broker to show the panel accessed and the alternative quotes obtained.

How Apex helps

Apex Insurance Brokers is an independent commercial broker based in Bristol, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under FRN 724952. We place hospitality risks across the South West catchment — pubs, restaurants, hotels, B&Bs, cafés, takeaways, late-night venues and event spaces — and we hold appointed agencies with specialist hospitality desks at the major composites and the Lloyd's market for non-standard risks.

What we actually do at renewal: prepare the submission properly, present it to insurers who want this class of business, argue inner limits and warranty wording before bind rather than after a claim, and act as your advocate when a claim comes in. We are not tied to any one composite and we are not a price-comparison machine.

If you would like us to look at your current cover — particularly if you are inside the 90-day window, or your insurer has just non-renewed or applied a large rate increase — speak to us and send through your current schedule and most recent loss run. We will tell you honestly whether your cover is competitive, whether the market can do better, and what is realistic to expect.

FAQs

Do I legally need hospitality insurance to run a pub or restaurant in the UK?

Employers' Liability is a legal requirement for any business with employees (statutory minimum £5m, most policies £10m). Public Liability is not legally required but is contractually required by almost every commercial landlord. Any premises licence application or transfer will be questioned without an active liability programme.

How much does hospitality insurance cost in the UK?

There is no honest single number — premium is driven by gross receipts, food/wet/accommodation mix, claims history, construction, fire-suppression equipment and trading hours. As a rough guide, a single-site café might pay £600–£1,200; a food-led pub £2,500–£5,000; a wet-led late-night bar £4,000–£8,000; a 20-bedroom country-house hotel £8,000–£20,000+. Illustrative only — we quote on the actual risk.

My fish-and-chip shop has had a fryer fire — can I still get cover?

Yes, but the market narrows. Expect a higher fire excess, a written warranty to install or upgrade wet-chemical suppression, and a requirement for TR19-compliant six-monthly extraction cleaning. We have placed risks of this profile through Lloyd's and the specialist hospitality MGAs.

Can I add my serviced apartment or Airbnb to a single hospitality policy?

Sometimes, but more often serviced apartments and short-let property need a specific policy rather than being grafted onto a hotel policy. Where a client runs both, we usually place related but separate policies with consistent wording.

What's "Loss of Licence" cover and do I need it?

It pays out if your alcohol licence is revoked through no fault of your own. Tied tenants usually need it at lease-value level; free-of-tie operators at business-with-licence value. We recommend it for any licensed premises.

Will my policy pay if the EHO closes me down?

If closure follows an insured peril (fire, communicable disease, food contamination) and your policy includes the relevant extensions, yes. If closure follows a hygiene failure outside cover (rodent infestation traced to poor cleaning, for example), generally no. The wording of the food contamination and notifiable disease extensions determines the answer.

What indemnity period should I have on Business Interruption?

18 to 24 months as a baseline, and 24 to 36 months for hotels, listed buildings, thatched property and any premises with a realistic rebuild timeline above a year. The 12-month default on many SME packages is the single biggest cause of under-paid hospitality BI claims.

Do you place hospitality cover outside Bristol?

Yes — across the 50-mile catchment that takes in Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cardiff, Newport, Swindon, Taunton, Yeovil, Wells, Stroud and the Cotswolds. Process and panel are the same wherever the venue sits.

How long does a quote take?

For a clean, complete submission on a standard risk, two to five working days. For non-standard risks (wet-led, late-night, thatched, listed, multi-site, prior claims) usually two to three weeks because insurers refer to senior underwriters and we negotiate terms back and forth. This is why we ask for 60–90 days at renewal.

Is cyber insurance really necessary for a small hotel or restaurant?

Increasingly, yes. If you run a property management system, take card payments, hold guest data or use a third-party booking platform, you sit within the same exposure profile as larger venues. The standalone cyber market is now cheap enough that the risk-adjusted answer is usually to buy it.

Can I insure my smoking shelter and beer garden under the same policy?

Yes — these are external structures and should be itemised on the Material Damage section with their own sums insured. Standard "outbuilding" wording sometimes excludes them or applies an inner limit.

What happens if I sell the business mid-policy?

Hospitality policies are not generally transferable. The seller cancels (usually pro-rata return less a fee) and the buyer takes out a fresh policy. We typically run buyer and seller through cancellation and inception in parallel to avoid any gap during completion.

Other sectors we cover

Coverage area

Apex sits in Bristol but places hospitality risks across the South West and South Wales — from the Bristol harbour and Park Street late-night cluster through to Bath's heritage hotels, the Cheltenham Festival hotel market, the Cotswolds wedding-venue belt, Glastonbury and Wells during Festival week, Yeovil and Sherborne country-house hotels, and the Bristol Channel coastal trade. See the commercial insurance Bristol and South West pillar, with city-specific detail at Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, Wells, Weston-super-Mare and Stroud.

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