“You could be booking into a hotel which could be a death trap,” as you have no idea whether it has been properly inspected.
This is the verdict from fire safety expert Alan Cox, who appeared this week on the BBC’s Inside Out programme. The documentary investigated the fire safety of several hotels in the South West in the wake of the Penhallow Hotel fire that caused the deaths of three people in 2007.
Cox and the BBC team undertook an undercover investigation into 14 older-style hotels in the South West of England to find out whether they would pass his fire safety investigation. Of the 14, 11 failed the inspection, with examples shown of rotten wooden fire escapes, service pipes not sealed, piles of flammable junk in the basement of one hotel, and fire doors that did not close properly.
Many of these sights will be no surprise to anyone who has inspected properties regularly, but Cox is concerned that customers will have little or no idea of the potential scale of fire breaches until it’s too late and that inspections from fire services are not doing enough. He said:
Clearly we’ve seen some significant problems, and the danger is that if the fire authorities don’t increase their inspection ratios and enforcement action then unfortunately multiple death fire will occur again in hotels.
He added that, “In my view the system’s not working.”
One solution that could be used to raise awareness of hotels with poor fire safety is for customers to take a more pro-active approach. Ask the hotel about its fire-risk assessment, and if the staff are unable to help you, then a TripAdvisor review should reflect the fact. When a hotel sees its bookings start to drop from the internet, it will soon sharpen up its act.
Phil Martin, from Devon and Somerset Fire Service, denied the problem was as bad as the BBC suggested:
The vast majority of premises do take fire safety very seriously, and what we’ve found in the last six years is a diminishing number of fires in that type of property, and we’ve had zero fire deaths in six years in non-domestic properties.
Now that’s not something that we get complacent about, and we do everything that we can to help businesses to comply with legislation. But the responsibility sits fairly and squarely with the people who know and manage the building.
You can watch Inside Out South West’s investigation on the iPlayer until Monday 16th September.
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