Final Homegrown weekend kicks off for Wellington’s hospitality sector

Friday, 14 March 2025

This weekend will be big for Wellington’s hospitality scene, with the city’s last Homegrown kicking off on Friday.

The festival will be a loss for businesses, but WellingtonNZ is working on finding replacement events.

The economic impact of last year’s festival was about $3 million.

This is Wellington’s last Homegrown weekend.

The festival, which has enticed thousands of visitors to the city and transformed the waterfront to a raving celebration of Kiwi music every year for 18 years, will be held in a new city from 2026.

That city is yet to be announced.

It is a loss for the capital. But among the hospitality sector - which benefits hugely from the weekend - there is no bitterness.

“It will leave a significant gap in the calendar for hospitality, but at the same time it brings an opportunity to look for a refresh,” said Greig Wilson, co-owner of Epic Hospitality, the business behind bars like Vinyl, Eva and El Barrio.

“I have absolutely no doubt that it will be replaced with something spectacular … and 18 years is a pretty good run for an event.”

Sean Golding, who owns Golding’s Free Dive and Intrepid Hotel, is also staying optimistic.

“Losing any event of that scale is pretty tough for a city that's struggling. And the gap will have to be filled by something pretty significant … But you’ve got to be optimistic that someone will be brave,” he said, adding that events like Homegrown can’t last forever.

“If things are coming to their natural end with Homegrown, maybe it is just time for a change.”

That said, it comes at a tough time for the city. For a small hotel like the Intrepid, which has just 18 rooms, the event is a god-send, Golding said.

“We don’t have to struggle for bookings, which is really, really nice, and makes a change from the last year - which has been tough.”

He said things have improved since February, but he feels lucky to be in that situation. “I know there are people out there struggling… and if you had a big hotel with hundreds of rooms it'd be pretty terrifying right now.”

Festivals can have a massive economic impact for their host cities. WOMAD, which kicks off in New Plymouth today, contributed a whopping $6 million to Taranaki’s economy in 2020.

Last year’s Homegrown had a net benefit of nearly $3 million for the city, said WellingtonNZ’s chief operating officer, Heidi Morton.

“Unfortunately we don’t have the data of where that spending is going, so we can’t say this percentage went to retail, or this amount went to hospitality. But from our assessment last year, 64% of attendees came from out of the region to attend the event. That was approximately 14,500 people.”

This year, Homegrown organisers are expecting nearly 20,000 people to attend on Saturday, with 7000 also going on Friday.

According to Wellington Chamber of Commerce chief executive Simon Arcus, Homegrown does more than bring people in for one weekend. It is like a marketing campaign for the city, he said.

“We get about 15,000 people coming from outside of the city. And they have fun, tell their friends, and it makes a nice little snowball effect. That’s the thing we will really miss.”

Golding said this is something he has witnessed at Golding’s Free Dive.

“It's really nice to see people in a place where they would never normally go. Most of the time we can give them a reason to tell their friends about it, so there’s a trickle down of people coming to the bar.

“We rely on our locals for our customer base, but every new person that comes in will potentially tell a few people about what a great time they had.”

As Wellington’s economic development agency, WellingtonNZ has no plans to leave a gaping hole in the city’s social calendar.

“Our team are working really hard, and we have a really strong pipeline of events that we're in discussions with,” Morton said. “With loss comes opportunity in terms of that particular time on the waterfront opening up for other uses.”

“Festival competitors to Homegrown that may not have come to Wellington because of Homegrown are really interested in the city now, so we’ve got a strong pipeline that we are working on to see if any would be a viable option,” she added, declining to go into any further detail.

That is not to say there will be another festival on Wellington’s waterfront next year - smaller events will need to be incubated, she acknowledged.

Or, as Simon Arcus put it, “there will be a little acorn that we can grow into something fantastic.”