One of the reasons I no longer use older hotels in 'historic' buildings. While they will meet the required standards for safety it's less like!y they will have things like sprinklers and retrofitting enclosed fire escapes may mean compromises in accessibility. Dull they maybe but there is something to be said for the chains.
Whilst at college we had a trip to Paris, and stayed in a small back street hotel, with a narrow central spiral staircase right up to the top floor. There were no emergency exits, no access to the roof and no balconies. How anyone would have got out in a fire is beyond me.
with a narrow central spiral staircase right up to the top floor.
one of the city museums in New York was a tenement (run by a lesbian cooperative actually) . THAT had been a tenement but the owner cdnt be arrissed to modify the 1910 ( yup) fire prevention orders
so he HAD hammered tin foil to the ceilings and constructed air vents ( vertical ) as air conduits.
This led to worse fires as they acted in a fire as chimneys spreading it from floor to floor
I used to travel a lot for work, here and abroad. One think I always did, whilst sober, was to check the emergency exits and routes. Some of the dig I have stopped in though didnt even have fire alarms.
There should always be a fire plan on the back of the bedroom door, showing the route to 'a place of safety'. Sprinkler systems cost £thousands and would probably make a lot of small hotels / B&B's go out of business.
Ideally you should count the number of bedroom doors between your room and the fire exit as you wouldn`t necessarily be able to see them in a fire. I`ve always been a bit lazy about doing that though even though I have been in two hotel fires (not in the UK)
//There should always be a fire plan on the back of the bedroom door, showing the route to 'a place of safety'.//
OK, well you can stop and study it when the alarm goes off, I will already be halfway down the stairs by the time you try to leave your room.
yes 237sj, that is usually what I do, or look for similar ways. Having been in a fire I know how easy it is to get disorientated and how smoke is thick enough to hide lights.