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Published on September 6, 2007

He called reception from his 10th floor room but no one picked up the phone.

"No one told us the place was on fire and there was no fire alarm whatsoever," he said, as he recalled his brush-with-death.

On their way to the fire escape ladder at the back of the building, Mr "A" and his wife knocked on other hotel room doors to warn the occupants of the fire.

"The metal fire escape ladder was narrow and small so we had to carefully climb down one by one," he said.

Mr "A" came from London and had already been at the hotel for several days into his scheduled 14-night stay.

Another tourist, an Iranian national in his 50s, said he had travelled to Bangkok with his wife and two other friends and that the hotel had no fire alarm. They only knew of the fire and fled when they heard the sirens outside.

Danish tourist Martin Andersen, 27, from Copenhagen, told the Associated Press (AP) there was no fire alarm. His girlfriend Gitte Christensen, 27, called the situation "chaotic".

"This has been handled very, very badly in my opinion. There was just nobody in charge. There was no evacuation point," said George Adigun, 39, a commodity consultant from London.

A hotel room boy Prasit Panthareu, 32, who was the first to spot the fire, said he was on his way to deliver room service at midnight when he spotted black smoke coming out of the fitness room, an area which had no water sprinklers. He alerted six hotel mechanics who tried to douse the flames using fire-extinguishers but they couldn't deal with the rapidly spreading fire.

He said he did not know the cause of fire because nobody should have been in the area at the time.

The Nation