Jaipur: The tourism department will ease homestay rules under the Centre’s Business Reforms Action Plan, raising the room limit from five to at least eight and scrapping key registration hurdles.The reforms, set to be notified soon, will remove the mandatory owner-occupancy requirement and do away with multiple NOCs. Online self-renewal will be the new process to cut paperwork and visits to govt offices.The changes are aimed at reducing compliance, improving ease of doing business, and making homestays more viable for homeowners, investors and community-based tourism.Until now, operating a registered homestay has involved several procedural requirements. Property owners had to obtain No Objection Certificates (NOCs) from multiple agencies before registration, renew registrations through a cumbersome process, and comply with an owner-occupancy condition that required the owner to stay on the premises.Homestays were also restricted in terms of room capacity, limiting their commercial viability. The reforms aimed at enhancing ease of doing business will remove many of these barriers.Under the new framework, the owner-occupancy requirement has been abolished, allowing eligible property owners to operate homestays even if they are not residing on the same premises.The only reform still awaiting implementation is the de-linking of hotel star classification from mandatory services, licences, NOCs and approvals. The proposal is currently pending with the finance department after being initiated by the excise department.According to the tourism department officials, all other milestones under the reform package have been completed, including the launch of the online portal, while the remaining compliance will be uploaded to the govt’s MIS once the final approval is received.The reforms are expected to encourage more households to enter the hospitality sector and improve Rajasthan’s ease of doing business ranking by making the homestay ecosystem more accessible and less regulation intensive.
