Fire Action Notices for Holiday Lets: What to Display and Where

Turn up to inspect a holiday let with no fire action notice on the wall and a fire officer can do a great deal more than tut. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (the RRO 2005), a fire and rescue authority that finds you have never told guests what to do in a fire can serve an enforcement notice, and where the risk is serious, a prohibition notice that stops you taking a single booking until the problem is fixed. A missing or useless fire action notice in a holiday let is one of the easiest failings for an inspector to write up, because it is either on the wall or it is not.

The reason it matters is blunt: your guest does not know your building. They booked two nights, arrived after dark, and have no idea where the back door is or which way the stairs turn. A clear fire action plan, the sort every Airbnb and self-catering host should print and display, is the difference between a calm two-minute exit and people trapped on a landing. Get it wrong and you also risk your insurer refusing a claim, because most holiday let policies require you to have met your fire safety duties.

Why a fire action notice matters more in a rented holiday home

In your own home you know the layout in the dark. Your guests do not, and that single fact is why the law treats paying guest accommodation seriously. As the person who lets the property, you are the "responsible person" under the RRO 2005, and your guests are "relevant persons" you have a legal duty to inform and instruct.

The Home Office guidance, "Making your small paying-guest-accommodation safe from fire", applies to properties sleeping up to ten guests across no more than four bedrooms, which covers most cottages, flats and Airbnb lets. It is explicit that a simple emergency plan, displayed where guests will see it, is a core part of keeping the place safe. This sits alongside your written fire risk assessment, not instead of it, a point covered in the wider Airbnb fire safety requirements every UK host must meet.

What a fire action notice for a holiday let must tell your guests

A fire action notice is not a wall of text. It is a short, plain-English set of instructions a stranger can read and act on in seconds, at night, possibly with children in tow. Keep it to the five things that actually save lives.

1. Raise the alarm. Tell guests to shout to warn others and, where fitted, operate the alarm. The point is that nobody stays asleep.
2. Leave immediately by the nearest safe exit. Get everyone out. Do not stop to collect belongings, valuables or phones.
3. Do not tackle the fire. Any extinguisher or fire blanket you provide is for a guest's escape route, not for firefighting. Fighting a fire wastes the seconds they need to get out.
4. Go to the assembly point. Name a specific safe spot away from the building, such as the far end of the drive or the pavement across the road, so everyone gathers in one place.
5. Call 999. Tell them to call from a safe place once outside and never to go back in for any reason.

Crucially, the notice must carry the full property address including the postcode. A guest ringing 999 in a panic often cannot say where they are, and a holiday let they booked online may be somewhere they have never been before. Printing the address on the notice removes that risk in one stroke.

Where to display the fire action notice

A notice folded in a welcome drawer is worthless. It has to be visible at the moments a guest would need it, which means fixing it in the right places rather than the convenient one.

• By the main entrance or in the hallway, next to the final exit, so it is the first thing a guest passes on the way in and the last on the way out.
• In every bedroom, ideally on the back of the door or beside it. Fires at night are the ones that kill, and a guest woken by a smoke alarm needs the instructions where they are sleeping, not downstairs.
• Near the kitchen, which is where most domestic fires start, so the escape message is reinforced at the highest-risk spot.
• On upper floors and by internal stairs in a maisonette or a property over several storeys, where the way out is less obvious.

Keep the format simple. An A5 or A4 card, clearly printed, permanently fixed rather than propped up or laminated and left loose, does the job. Guests should never have to hunt for it or wonder whether it is current.

The wider guest fire safety information pack: your fire action plan for Airbnb and direct bookings

The notice on the wall is the emergency short version. The information pack is where you give guests the detail before anything goes wrong, and it is where a good host stands apart from a careless one. You can provide it as a printed welcome folder, a laminated sheet, a digital check-in guide, or all three.

A solid pack tells guests, in advance and in plain terms:

• Where the smoke alarms and any carbon monoxide alarm are, and that they must never be covered or removed. The detail on placement sits in the holiday let smoke and CO alarm requirements.
• The escape routes from every bedroom, including the second way out where one exists, and any window that acts as an emergency escape.
• The location of any fire extinguisher or fire blanket, with the reminder that these are for escape, not heroics.
• The named assembly point, matching the one on the fire action notice.
• A host or manager emergency contact number, so guests can reach a real person fast.

Escape routes deserve real thought rather than a line in a folder, particularly travel distances and whether upstairs windows meet the standard for escape. That ground is covered in detail in the holiday let fire escape requirements for windows, routes and travel distances. Get the pack and the notice saying the same thing, and a guest who reads either one arrives at the same safe answer.

The mistakes that fail an inspection

Most fire action notice failings are not exotic. They are the same handful of errors, and an inspector spots them in minutes.

• A generic template with the wrong address, or no address at all, downloaded once and never tailored to the property. This is the most common and the most dangerous, because it defeats the 999 call.
• The notice hidden away in a guest folder or a kitchen drawer rather than fixed to a wall where it can be seen.
• Out-of-date instructions after you have changed the layout, added a room, or moved an extinguisher, so the notice describes a building that no longer exists.
• No named assembly point, leaving guests milling around next to a burning building instead of gathering somewhere safe.
• Instructions that assume local knowledge, such as "use the side gate", which means nothing to someone who arrived last night.

If you want a single document that catches these before an inspector does, work through the self-catering fire safety checklist and treat the notice and pack as line items you sign off, not afterthoughts.

Next steps

A fire action notice is cheap to get right and expensive to get wrong. Print a plain, five-point notice carrying your full address and postcode, fix it by the entrance and in every bedroom, and back it with a clear information pack that names your alarms, escape routes, assembly point and emergency contact. Then make sure the notice matches what your fire risk assessment actually found, because the two have to agree.

That assessment is the document everything else hangs off, and it is a legal requirement for every holiday let, not an optional extra. FRASafe's holiday let fire risk assessment walks you through every area required by HMSO guidance, completed online in 30 to 45 minutes for £45. Do it once, print your notice from what it tells you, and you can take your next booking knowing a guest who has never set foot in the place would still get out safely.