Welcome to your daily briefing on hospitality developments in Alabama. Today we're covering 7 key stories including updates on alabama hospitality headlines, background & context. Let's dive in.
4 stories
The Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries provides permit applications for food safety compliance.
Hospitality operators in AL must secure proper permits to legally operate food service establishments and avoid regulatory penalties.
The Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board requires applicants to print a pre-application, gather required documentation from checklist form LCD-2, and schedule an appointment with their division office.
Hospitality professionals in AL must follow this process to obtain or renew liquor licenses and permits required to legally serve alcohol.
The Alabama ABC Board's Licensing Division requires applicants to contact their county office and complete a pre-application packet to apply for a license.
Hospitality professionals across Alabama must navigate this process to legally serve alcohol, making timely application essential for new and expanding operations.
The Alabama ABC Board's Licensing and Compliance Division issues permits for alcohol and tobacco sales while promoting temperance and enforcing regulations that ensure fair competition among all businesses.
Every hospitality business in Alabama that sells alcohol or tobacco must navigate this licensing process and comply with ABC regulations to operate legally and maintain their competitive standing.
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3 stories
Federal FLSA permits tip-credit on wages only for employees who customarily and regularly receive tips, and only for the time spent on tip-producing duties. Many states (and the federal "80/20" rule) limit how much side-work can be performed while paying tip-credit wage. Polishing silverware for an hour at the start of shift is the most common silent violation.
Wage-and-hour collective actions in restaurants frequently win on the side-work issue and produce back-pay liability across all tipped staff in the lookback period.
The merchant — the restaurant or hotel — remains responsible for PCI compliance regardless of the POS vendor's certifications. Vendor compliance covers the software; merchant responsibility covers network segmentation, employee access, and incident response. "We use a PCI-compliant POS" is not an audit response.
Card-brand fines after a breach apply to the merchant, not the vendor. Self-assessment questionnaires are required annually and are reviewed by acquiring banks.
Short-term rental platforms collect and remit local occupancy tax in some jurisdictions and not others — the same platform may handle it for one city and not the next over. Hosts who assume the platform handles all tax obligations frequently owe state or local tax that was never withheld.
Tax authorities are increasingly using platform data to identify hosts; back-tax assessments in this category routinely run multi-year and include penalties.
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