The regulations every hotel must meet.
Hotels are non-domestic premises under the Fire Safety Order 2005, with elevated risk because of public access, transient occupancy, and sleeping accommodation. Here is what applies across your portfolio.
Fire Safety Order 2005
Article 8 imposes a duty on the Responsible Person to take general fire precautions, including maintaining fire doors. The cornerstone law for every non-domestic hotel premises.
BS 9999:2017
The code of practice for fire safety in the design, management, and use of buildings. Applies across every type of hotel operation, from city centre to country house.
BS 8214:2016
Code of practice for fire door assemblies. The inspection standard DoorTRACE checklists follow as default. Used by competent inspectors UK-wide.
PAS 79-1:2020
Fire risk assessment methodology used by competent assessors. Fire door condition feeds directly into the FRA, which insurers and fire authorities read first.
Insurance conditions
Most hotel insurance policies require evidence of in-date, documented fire door inspections to remain valid. A lapsed inspection schedule can invalidate cover.
Premises licensing
Premises licence holders carry an implicit duty to demonstrate fire safety compliance to the local licensing authority on request.
Built around the way hotels actually operate.
DoorTRACE configures around the rhythms of hotel operations, not the other way round.
Every inspection, every property, one timeline.
Completed inspections, scheduled visits, overdue items, and pass rates across the whole portfolio. Filter by property, engineer, or inspection type. Every step audit-ready, every defect traceable back to the door that failed and the engineer who flagged it.
An engineer app designed for occupied buildings.
Quick visual surveys, photo-based defect logging, no laptops in front-of-house. Works offline in basement plant rooms, on rooftops, in lift lobbies, anywhere a hotel goes. Sync automatically when signal returns.
Public-facing compliance, on every door.
Every door carries a QR plaque that links to a public status page. Guests, inspectors, and fire authorities can verify the door is compliant from their own phone in under a second. The same QR scan opens a full inspection panel for your engineer.
Every property in one screen.
View your full hotel portfolio compliance posture in a single dashboard. Sort by brand, region, audit date, defect priority. Drill into any property to see live door status, scheduled inspections, and open remedial work.
The UK hotel market, in fire door terms.
A day in the life of an FM team running twelve hotels.
It is 07:00 on a Tuesday. The FM compliance lead for a twelve-property hotel group opens DoorTRACE before her first coffee.
Three properties show amber on the dashboard. One has a quarterly inspection due in eleven days, two have open defects past their target resolution date. She filters by priority and assigns two engineers from the firm's approved contractor list. The engineers' apps update inside thirty seconds.
At the Birmingham property, the duty manager flags a damaged closer on the corridor between rooms 312 and 320. She scans the QR plaque on her own phone. The defect appears in DoorTRACE with a photo, automatically tagged to the right door, ready for the engineer arriving later that morning.
By lunchtime the engineer has completed eighteen door inspections across two floors, working around the housekeeping schedule the property released that morning. Every inspection is signed, photographed, and synced. The defect from earlier is closed with before-and-after evidence.
The group's insurance broker emails asking for evidence of fire door compliance ahead of the upcoming renewal. The FM lead generates a portfolio report in under a minute. PDF, white-labelled, time-stamped. The broker has what they need before they finish their next meeting.