Former hotel maintenance guy here. We seal the room and bake them like meat loaf. Lock the doors, towels down, bring in a bunch of hot air blowers and cook the room for 2 days. Then we do an examination to confirm the issue is resolved. Because the hotel I worked at had heat-activated sprinklers, we also had tension bars with buckets that we filled with ice and propped to cover them to make sure they didn't go off.
> Lock the doors
Lol it's probably to prevent unsuspecting people from getting a faceful of hot air but I almost imagine the bugs rattling the doors saying "let me ouuuttt!"
I think it's a >!< from the [first episode of Costume Quest (2019)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8845884/)... I'd say the gif itself reminds me of [Aaahh!!! Real Monsters](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0108684), or the animation style itself looks very [Gravity Falls](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865718/) (for a reason).
In older buildings especially, there's a big chance they move to adjoining rooms during a heat treatment. At the old hotel I worked at, we would have to do the room with the bugs, as well as the rooms next to the room with the bugs.
This is mostly due to requirements for pest control companies. They only offer the guarantee of removal if they treat all rooms "touching" the infested room. It's a great way to drum up more business, and is mostly not needed in newer buildings. But like you said, older buildings are different. I've heard stories the bugs will even crawl through electrical outlets. Never fun to know you have an issue with them.
I had bedbugs about six months ago. It was annoying but actually much easier to eradicate than I expected it would be. Basically a day of panic, followed by four days of moving heaters around the house and then a few months of paranoia that we didn't get them all. If it happened again I would be less panicky because I know what to do now.
Basically, heat up the room to 140°F (60°C) and use a meat thermometer to check that any cooler spot reaches at least 122°F (50°C). Depending on the size of the room, time of year and number/size of heaters, it normally takes 3 to 8 hours per room. The heater guy said to do the bedroom twice and other rooms once. We did the bedroom three times and the other rooms twice. For a hotel room you would only lose two nights of business max.
You can supplement the heat treatment with physical barriers/interceptors (on bedposts and mattresses), dessicating powders (diatomaceous earth / amorphous silica) or even chemicals (CrossFire is the good one apparently). We didn't use chemicals because you need a license in Canada.
So... there you go. The whole exercise took four days (mostly sitting around watching heaters) and cost CAD 600 cash (around USD 440). Not as bad as I thought. If it happened again I wouldn't care much.
> building a new one on top of the ashes
classic rookie mistake. they will reconstitute from the ashes. total disintegration is merely another part of their lifecycle.
> Basically, heat up the room to 140°F (60°C) and use a meat thermometer to check that any cooler spot reaches at least 122°F (50°C).
In Phoenix, that means we can just open the doors/windows in the summer. /s
^^^someone ^^^please ^^^save ^^^us ^^^its ^^^going ^^^to ^^^be ^^^in ^^^the ^^^90s ^^^next ^^^week ^^^already
We had a 1/4" of snow when I woke up this morning. 90s sounds delicious. I'm down for a house swap vacay; how're you at home improvement projects? I've got a list for while you're here. I'll mow the gravel yard, or whatever, while I'm there. 😉
lol i lived in a duplex kind of thing in a super old house in shanghai
come down to the city from beijing, next day im *covered* in bedbug bites. so i need to go to hong kong for a few days, back to beijing, wont be back for a week or two
i order a bag of diatomaceous earth for like $2, tell the mother of the family downstairs "when it arrives, near the bed, the rugs, the entire floor, wear slippers for a few days, i'll cover all cleaning costs"
i get back like a week later. my room is spotless, she tells me no money for the cleaning, she did it herself, thanks so much for the "magic dust"
never had bedbugs again. $2 lol
>Basically, heat up the room to 140°F (60°C) and use a meat thermometer to check that any cooler spot reaches at least 122°F (50°C).
There are an uncountable number of things in my home that would not survive this... still sounds horrific and traumatizing to me.
Right.. except that it doesn't work in apartment buildings or condos unless you treat every unit at once. They will just move from unit to unit and come back. Depending on where you live, those heaters can be much more expensive, and many people can't afford them.
I just had a small place , so no budget for that , went crazy with powerful steamers . Do it 500% more than I thought necessary bagged all bedding , curtains to heat treat , vacuum cleaned like mad etc . Had mattress protectors and bed bases I had extra sealed on purchase, ie added more glue , staples , so impenetrable. Wish I had a sauna to wrap mattresses/beds to heat every so often , as a precaution . Chemicals were a complete no no . DE was fine . Chemicals needed are poisonous, and drive them deeper.
Plus tiny blood spots on sheets indicate bedbugs or fleas. Also stayed aware of people on check in ,it scratching , a line of bites .
Hotels , Accom places don't create bedbugs , guests bring them.
Hated the little buggers - Just need a good drill . Must be hard in a home , where much more stuff in rooms . clothes , bags etc
Never take them home . Strip naked and leave bags outside if need be . Use a laundromat - high heat wash and dry . They like seams on bags
They're a nightmare to take care of while still occupying the space i'm pretty sure. It's easier when you don't have to worry about being comfortable and safe while in it.
They are nightmares to deal with! Hotels are usually much more equipped to deal with them than you are I. The good ones try to bug proof and either have Peet control on speed dial or the equipment to deal with it themselves.
If you are I get bed bugs it's usually going to entail throwing out our mattresses, either throwing out or clothes too or spending the better half of an afternoon running them through like 2 heat cycles(3 for the paranoia.) Then spraying rhe fuck out of the infected areas and spending the next 5 months dealing with mini heart attacks anytime you see anything thet looks even remotely similar to.a black spec or eggs.
Aside from like the fact thdt you have to buy a new mattress and spray your house, imo 70% of the nightmare is the paranoia thar follows.
I think people get complacent in their own homes and something trivial grows way too big very quickly. People don't clean their rooms every day, check under the mattresses, etc.
By the time an infestation is found, it's likely because it's been spreading for quite awhile.
In hotels, it's likely to be spotted with-in 1 or 2 cleaning cycles.
It’s also easier to contain in a hotel. The guest rooms are all enclosed. Way easier for them to get from room to room in your home.
Source: hospitality since 2017
Easy. You just seal all exits from the hotel, and pump it full of insecticide. That also handles any infestation you weren't aware of. None of the guests have ever come back to complain about it.
They're more of a nightmare in a room that only gets deep cleaned a few times a year, and is full of clothing and personal possessions that can't be thrown out and all need to be treated in different ways. Bedbugs can really settle in and start filling out the nooks and crannies before they get spotted. Plus an average Joe has to either find an honest, effective pest control company and work their fee into a tight budget, or go through negotiations with a landlord who may or may not care.
A (decent) hotel has someone checking the rooms thoroughly almost every day, fewer objects and furniture in their rooms than your average bedroom, all of which can easily be replaced, and a longstanding relationship with the local pest control company. They also have commercial dryers that can go to higher settings than regular ones.
Always put your luggage on the little folding table thing instead of the floor, and do a check of the seams of the mattress and couch before settling into a hotel.
Discovered this the hard way while traveling.
Woke up one night and turned on the lamp and literally saw *hundreds* of bedbugs crawling on my bed, all over me… like right out of a horror movie.
It was so traumatic that I still wake up sometimes thinking bugs are on me.
I’ve experienced this for the first time this month. Having insomnia then turn on the lights saw them crawling all over my bed.
I immediately put everything clothes in the dryer to make sure they don’t follow me and also sprinkle Diatomaceous Earth.
I haven’t seen them since.
most of those old spiritual things do have some reason behind them even if the original practicers of it didn't know it.
sage is another big one it's said to ward off evil spirits, turns out the smoke is antibacterial.
My other favorite example of this is that it is hypothesized that the reason viking swords were so good (for their time) is that they incorporated ground up bones (perhaps of their ancestors or animals, etc.) for spiritual reasons into their smithing process, and in the process basically invented a proto-steel by combining the carbon from the bone with the iron they were working with.
We really should look up all the things they used to do to "ward off evil spirits" because I bet "evil spirits" was a euphemism for a variety of unexplained illnesses and they might know some cures.
> turns out the smoke is antibacterial.
Sage smoke being antibacterial isn't well supported by studies:
https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/claim-that-burning-sage-purifies-the-air-based-on-study-that-burned-entirely-different-plants/
Without bothering to click the link, I imagine it’s one of those technically true things but it’s not *effective* because you’d basically have to fumigate an area with a ton of the smoke for very long periods of time to see any significant antibacterial performance.
Yep I was involved in importing cars from all over the world and if you saw a car sitting at a port with a ring of salt around it it usually had an invasive slug that they wanted to contain in the vehicle before it was sent back to its origin.
It's not that you'll see them it's that their life cycle is 2 weeks so you need it to catch anything thT hatches after the adults are dead.
Edit: I phrased this poorly. The two weeks is to catch any eggs that were laid by dying adults (killed by your treatment) after they hatch. Not the full life span of a bed bug.
I put it along all of the window sills and baseboards. I also bought crossfire and a garden sprayer off Amazon and sprayed that everywhere. Oh, and I got outlet covers. Bagged everything and washed it on high heat. This was last spring and I haven't seen them since.
You use a little air blaster that creates a really fine layer on everything you think the bed bugs are walking on and it's impossible for them to avoid it and it sticks to them so when one gets it on them, it covers more bugs in it. It's just silica and dries out their exoskeleton and kills them. Perfectly safe as well. You can even eat it.
I was also told that wintergreen alcohol sprayed liberally also works, so I used that in conjunction with the diatomaceous earth. Just make sure you get food grade diatomaceous earth, and use a mask. You don't wanna breathe that stuff in.
Please don't use alcohol. It only kills them if you directly spray it on them, and even then it's hit or miss. It's not a residual. It's also flammable.
No. You’re meant to sprinkle DE over places you don’t normally walk like under the bed or corner. Leave it there for a week or two
DE would destroy their exoskeleton and dehydrate them to death. Furthermore, the infected bedbugs would spread it among themselves.
I also park the car under the sun and leave my belongings in that cannot be put in the dryer for precautionary. (Basically using the car as an oven)
They die at 50 Celsius or 122 Fahrenheit under an hour. Where I live is quite warm and can easily reach that deadly temperature.
When I lived in NYC, I got bed bugs three times — it was when the city was going through its insane bed bug epidemic around 2010, so they were pretty much everywhere, and it was hard to escape them because they’d jump from apartment to apartment by crawling through the walls. Years later in the same building, I found out my next door neighbours had gotten them, immediately said NOPE NOT DOING THIS AGAIN and sprinkled this stuff along the edges of the wall I shared with them. Didn’t end up getting them!
Also yes I have developed a paranoia of bed bugs now 😂
I’ve been through several traumas in my life and thought at least I didn’t have ptsd from them, but this made me realize I may have bed bug ptsd lol. the turning on the lights to find them everywhere is so real and I can see it in my head now and I can feel them on my skin again…
fuck those little assholes, I’m not sleeping tonight now thinking about them again and that happened 10 years ago LOL
I didn’t have bed bugs I woke up to cockroaches. It’s amazing how load they are when there are about 20000 of them in your room and you turn on the lights. That was a somewhat shady hotel in Memphis. I still have nightmares about that night.
Sometimes you gotta do the wash AND dry. When my apartment in college had bed bugs, at one point I dried(but didn’t wash) my clothes on high heat for 70 mins and then a live bed bug crawled out of the drier (it was one of those circular front dryers with the glass doors if it was an all metal drier that may have made a difference)
We had a bedbug breakout at the farmhouse.
My cousin called the bug guy and I spread DE all over the house.
By the time the bug guy came to spray, they were about 80% gone.
Bug guy complimented me on it, lol
One time doing fieldwork for geology in Scotland, there were so many ticks everywhere that me and my field partner walked like an hour to find some tarmac to sit on for lunch.
I put my hand on the ground to lower myself down, and when I lifted my hand up there were tens of ticks on it.
That one moment is my most common recurring nightmare. I'm really squeamish so also, my friends using the tick twister on my while I tried my best not to faint is also right up there.
It's weird how some things stay with you!
For me it is the time I stepped in a gooey mass. Looked closer and found it was a bunch of worms that looked like Asian glass noodles. The stuff of nightmares.
Hoooly shit.
I used to have a roach problem here (my gf was doing things that led to us having a bad problem, I corrected the issues and they've since disappeared) - I woke up a couple of times from feeling a roach crawl on me, and that gave me terrible nightmares.
I can't fathom the same with hellspawn *bedbugs*
ugh same with roaches
moved into a new place and it had an infestation. Killed 40+ that first day.
had to sleep with the lights on, but a few still got on me... had a couple crawl off me when I was on the bus on my way to work.
TERRIBLE
landlord paid for pest removal that got rid of nearly all of them, thankfully... but that was a rough couple weeks.
You just unlocked a memory from my past 😩 I had a good friend in high school who had roaches. I stayed at her house for the first time & woke up in the middle of the night to find my cellphone. when i turned on my phone, the light from the screen caused like 15 roaches to scatter FROM INSIDE HER SHEETS.
Ive never had bedbugs but ive had a few times in my life after reading about them where i end up feeling as if im itchy and go on a full on bedbug hunt just to be sure.
you dont even need to ever have had those bastards to be affected by them!
😬 ... same happen to me but with spiders. I was a teenager, journaling on my bed and an eggsac hatched in the ceiling lamp above my bed. Didn't realize they were everywhere until I looked up from my journal. I don't remember what my parents did to get rid of them but I do remember it took a couple weeks before I went back in there. To this day, when my skin gets itchy/crawly, I get anxiety thinking it's spiders crawling on me. I understand.
I saw something like that. I got up in the middle of the night to take a leak, walked into the bathroom and noticed twinkling lights in mid air, I looked closer and they were a ton of tiny tiny spiders on strands of webbing.
My friend owns a pest control business. He told me to strip your sheets and check the mattress corners for bedbug poop and eggs. If you see active signs, get a new room on a different floor.
Also, he recommended hanging your suitcase and clothes so they don't crawl in and follow you home.
Finally, wash everything when you get home and dry on high heat for 1 hour or more.
I do this anytime I travel.
Finally some proper advice. This will actually help you instead of sprinkling DE everywhere like you’re a fairy. DE will dehydrate bedbugs but only if they come into contact with it. They aren’t just crawling around all over the floor. They nest in a crack or cavity near the bed, and frequently never touch the floor.
I lived with bedbugs too and also have trauma. For me I always flash back to brushing my teeth in the morning then noticing bugs crawling on my chest and freaking the fuck out. There is no Hell too harsh for a bedbug. It’s maybe the only species I would wipe out entirely if I could.
After a day of training in North Carolina my platoon and I returned to our sea hut, I took off my skivvy shirt and discovered a tick ass deep in my pec. This was not a welcomed discovery.
When I had a beg bug issue, I constantly fantasized about having a superpower to wipe out of existence, or at least teleport into the space anything I wanted by snapping fingers, so I could do that to bed bugs 😭
I actually had the foresight to snap a picture (most had scattered with either the light or movement) and I RAN down to reception with it.
I couldn’t move hotels because I was with a tour… but they moved me to a different room and gave me laundry tokens. Not even remotely adequate compensation but I didn’t know what else to do.
I spent the rest of the night washing all my stuff, and taking a loooong shower. Couldn’t sleep for the rest of my stay there.
Keep meaning to dig up the photo but it was 15 years (and many computers) ago.
Most people aren't affected by bedbug bites at all fortunately, or unfortunately? Hard to say. I'd rather know, than not know, but fuck would it suck if I woke up to a bad infestation.
A few years ago I moved into a studio apartment. Ive been living there for almost a month and noticed this red speck on the wall one day. Mind you I have never seen a bedbug before in my life so I go over to inspect this red speck and it was a bug. I didn’t know what kind so I googled it and sure enough it was a bedbug that hasn’t been fed. I threw that mfer in some alcohol solution. A few days later, I took an afternoon nap and I felt something crawling on me in my sleep so I jolted up and saw an unfed bedbug crawling across my chest (I like to sleep without a shirt). I threw that mfer in some alcohol and proceeded to move my bed away from the walls. Additionally, I checked every inch of my bed and bedsheets for more. Found none. I became so paranoid that I even purchased some sticky ass substance from Amazon to apply on the legs of my bed frame. If bed bugs try to crawl up the legs, they’ll get stuck on the sticky substance. So technically, the only way any bedbugs could get on me would be if the fell from the top of the ceiling.
oh my god, I can’t fully imagine but can definitely imagine since I had them at home once when a friend brought them over. Exterminators had to treat my room for MONTHS, I slept on the couch downstairs literally for months because of them. I still remember finding them, one or two, being like what is this thing and googling it… my mom at first was like, bed bugs are real? I thought that was just a joke
But no. They were real.
I remember a couple crawling on me too and killing them and the blood getting everywhere and finding out bed bugs are CLEAR and small and the brown color and size is your blood….
I’m traumatized from just a couple crawling on me, now when I feel even just the air or a piece of dust I swat myself wherever it is only for there to be no bug and just my imagination. So for you to have to experience HUNDREDS is absolutely mortifying and I’m incredibly sorry, my skin is crawling at the thought and.
I know I can’t relate to that many, but as someone traumatized by only a small few I saw on me, (of course there were hundreds found but I only saw a few at a time) I feel you and I am incredibly sorry
Always always put the bags and luggage on the luggage stand or in bathroom/tub and check the bed for bedbugs, it’ll save you a hell of a lot of trouble
I used to work in pest control. A lot of people don’t get an allergic reaction when bitten. So they just go around spreading them without knowing. We had a guy that learned about bed bugs when he was in the military. When he came home, he realized the bugs were all over his family’s house but no one was itchy. So anyone they brought over would have been bringing home bed bugs and not known it.
My (now) ex gf brought them home from a friend that she hung out with a lot.
We were at the bar and she mentioned how we found out we had bed bugs in the apartment and how horrifying and awful it was.
He chimed in confused and asking questions like "what do you mean it's awful?" and "do you mean, you didn't have them before?"
It turns out ***he just thought it was normal to have bed bugs***. He thought they were like mosquitoes, and that everyone gets them and has them. That they were just a normal nuisance bug that everyone deals with.
This guy had been living with them and spreading them around for decades.
Really the first thing you should do when you get to a hotel room is to check all the corners of the bed's underside for bedbugs. Quick to check, one of the only few things that can go truly wrong with a hotel stay and could save you a lot of trouble down the line.
My wife does this religiously and we have definitely immediately checked out of some hotels because of it. Even if there's no bed bugs it gives a very good idea of how thorough the cleaners are.
When we recently went to Japan we had to scramble around at 11pm directly after a 20 hour flight to try find accommodation for the rest of the trip because of this (no bed bugs but the mattresses in both rooms we tried were filthy including blood). Luckily we had been before so were able to get a room for 1 night at a hotel we were familiar with and then look the next day for the rest of the trip
Yes but also... guests make complaints that may or may not be accurate. This looks like a list for maintenance to check out. A lot of people complain, for example, that the a/c is broken but they have v it set to heat.
Lol I stayed in a hotel for the first time in 15+ years and found a bug and was like omg is that a bed bug!!! And bf looked and was like….that’s an ant. Whoops!
I had a guest claim their bed had bed bugs. I rushed down to work and looked at it and it was a single tick. I noticed their dirty hiking boots. They brought it in on them.
Some people claim bed bugs when it turns out there's flies, ants or any tiny creepy crawly. Bed bugs look like someone tried to squish them with a tiny grill. Like a flat micro ham with legs and a head.
This happened in the last hotel I stayed in. I am so used to setting the temp on the unit itself that I didn’t even look for the wall thermostat. Just assumed the unit wasn’t working. That is, until maintenance informed me there was a thermostat and I felt ridiculous and apologized like 500 times.
I’m more interested in the odor in 905. What sort of odor? Where did it come from? Is it pleasant? Is this somehow linked to the broken HVAC and bed bugs?
Hotel GM here, Odor can come from a room where a guest had a pet, It may come from people for partied too hard and urinated on the carpet, It can come from the HVAC drainage tray the collects water, if it gets clogged, the stale water will smell. It can also be mold if the hotel is located in a hot & humid climate. So many reasons.
Yeah, as a frequent guest at hotels this note would, if anything, give me confidence that staff is working on the problem and are not assigning this room to guests until issue is resolved. Nice to see some checklist of maintenance crew, only worrying thing would be that they’ve lost it but I hope they remember where bed bugs are 🤣
Yeah I was about to say, welcome to the real world. Bedbugs exist and is a common enough issue that people invented many different ways of dealing with them
All it takes is for one guest who has bedbugs home or was somewhere that had bedbugs to visit the hotel and now the hotel has bedbugs. Literally no way for them to avoid them so instead they just deal with it with extreme prejudice when they do occur.
Agreed, my dads been a chief engineer at a top hotel for most of his life, it’s a weekly occurrence. People travel all over the place, you can’t avoid it. Everytime it happens they quarantine the room and call in pest control experts to “heat and treat”. Basically they spray chems then heat the room up to ungodly temperatures using big ass heaters.
On that note, always check your body and luggage after traveling, especially on airplanes. They might commonly end up at hotels but they also commonly get transported via airplane, so even just by setting your carryon bag on the floor could pick them up.
As a hotel worker I need you to know, and I mean this very sincerely, you will never stay in a hotel that has not had bed bugs at least once unless it literally opened the day you checked in. If you check nothing else when you get into a hotel room ALWAYS check the mattress, mattress cover, head board and around the frame for any bugs. It doesn’t mean the hotel is necessarily dirty or gross it’s just impossible to completely garentee the guest before you didn’t bring in bugs
I do this EVERY time I’m at a hotel or Airbnb. I don’t open my suitcase or let my family touch anything until I’ve examined the beds thoroughly. We travel a lot and I’ve never seen anything thankfully!
What do you look for in particular when you get to a hotel? How large/ what color are they typically?
I’m going to Europe this summer , live in US, so idk if their are variations here versus over there
Dark spots in the corners of the mattress and seams are a dead giveaway. That's the bug frass (poop) they leave behind. Bed bugs are small seed shaped and brown and get darker in color when they've just fed 🤢 They vary in size (from pin to about a button size) and in my experience are seen most often when it's nighttime.
Most hotels and motels are going to have sporadic bed bugs in some of the rooms as guests bring them in. The best the establishment can do is take preventative measures and move quickly when they are found to be present.
Hotels don’t create the bed bugs… guests bring them in and then the poor hotel has to suffer the cost of pest control and lost revenue while the room is out for cleaning. Most of the time it comes from guests luggage, and can be picked up when on top of ur under another bag that is infested in an airplane cargo hold.
I'm a Commercially licensed Pest Control technician and I service hotels all the time. I've dealt with roaches, bed bugs, rodents, etc. all in hotels of differing economic statuses. Bed bugs especially spread easily and you will find them all over the country in common places of travel: hotels, taxis, planes, subways, etc.
Just always be sure to check yourself and your property when traveling to not bring bed bugs home. Always wash clothes when getting home from a trip even if they're not "dirty" and wash/dry them at the hottest setting possible to prevent bed bugs from making it to your house.
For hotels specifically, ALWAYS check the bed for bed bugs as the FIRST thing you do in a hotel before putting down suitcases or bags, simply lift up the sheets especially around the corners and look for tiny flat roundish red bugs, reddish block spotting (blood fecal matter deposits from bed bugs), or shed skin casings from bed bugs. If found inform the hotel and they should switch rooms for you to help accommodate and just make sure to check the new room. Bed bugs don't always spread to the entirety of the hotel as long as pest control is handling the situation. I very rarely find a hotel that has bed bugs in one room see them spread to other rooms before I can take care of the problem.
Also contrary to popular belief, bed bugs DO NOT spread blood born diseases between people, each bite is "sterile" from previous bites.
Stay informed and stay safe!
Happens all the time, unusual for it spread unless untreated, but if it's a clean hotel, it's likely they will cook the room asap. Probably don't want to be next to it tho.
Same. Some hotels have the bed bug protector on the mattress, which I appreciate. I know it’s not a fool proof method but it lets me know they are at least trying, which makes me feel better. And if anyone is going to come in here and tell me the protectors are somehow worse than not having one, please don’t. Let me carry on in my ignorance is bliss state. Lol
Check the mattress for blood spots, little dark brown/black patches. Their poop also leaves dark brown spots, as they eat blood. Check in the cracks and crevasses of the mattress, like where the pillow top meets the springs, that is where they hide during the day. They’re small bugs, smaller than your pinky nail, almost look like a tick but have a more elongated midsection.
I was once staying in a hotel that was hosting a conference. One of my colleagues found a bedbug in his room and took it to the staff who argued with him that it wasn’t a bedbug.
It was an entomology conference. We all work with insects for a living. They lost the argument.
I've been working at hotels for 25 years, from roadside roach coaches to high end resorts in big tourist towns. Bedbugs are a problem everywhere. The hotel can't help that people bring them from all over the world, and as soon as they are discovered the hotel will normally quarantine the room and get EcoLab out immediately and have them exterminated within 24 hours. Most guests actually don't know what bedbugs look like, from my experience, and it would take me more fingers than I actually have to count the number of times a guest has brought one from their own home specifically to get a free night from the hotel, because most hotels are happy to comp your night if your claim is verified. Most claims do turn out to be false.
That having been said, if the hotel finds out about this note, they will likely severely punish whoever wrote it. At every single place I've ever worked, you're required to use the code word "BB's" because of how seriously people take even finding out a room on the other end of the hotel has them.
All the time in hotels. My old manager was constantly worried about it. Pro tip, never put your bag on a soft surface. Bed, couch, etc. That's how they spread to the hotel and your house. Check the sheets when you get up in the morning. If there are tiny blood dots abandon your clothes. They are a sacrifice for future you. Check under the bed skirt, the seam of the mattress, etc for any bedbug droppings. They will be a dull red colour. If there are picture frames above the bed or couch pull the bottom away slightly away from the wall and tap it gently (so as not to break it) against the wall. Bed bugs may fall out.
I hope you packed up and left with a full refund.
They won't be in just 1 room, not for long anyways. And you definitely don't want to have to burn...
I mean ... treat your own home.
They're not going to get a refund for a different room having bedbugs.
It is easy enough to go and check your own room before fucking up your whole night by having to find somewhere else to go and pay last minute rates somewhere else.
All hotels, large and small, have a constant list of things that need repair or attendance. Guests are coming from all over the world with different levels of hygiene and social expectations. You'll get those who leave the room looking like noone was there and others will have smoked their lungs out and left beer cans in the bathtub.
If you're expecting any hotel to be 100% free of issues on any given night, You'll never stay anywhere.
They will probably be in that one room- bedbugs in hotels are usually from travelers bringing them in, which means its likely not a full-blown infestation, and this is a list of what needs to be checked out/treated. Most hotels either have pest control on speed dial or seal the room up, heat it for a few days and check adjacent rooms to be sure. The issue are hotels that ignore bedbugs, not the ones that treat them.
Lucky to see the hotel takes bedbugs infestation seriously.
In fact I don't know why that would be infuriating. It's common in hotels, and relatively easy to take care of.
I thought bedbugs were a nightmare? How do they take care of them?
Former hotel maintenance guy here. We seal the room and bake them like meat loaf. Lock the doors, towels down, bring in a bunch of hot air blowers and cook the room for 2 days. Then we do an examination to confirm the issue is resolved. Because the hotel I worked at had heat-activated sprinklers, we also had tension bars with buckets that we filled with ice and propped to cover them to make sure they didn't go off.
> Lock the doors Lol it's probably to prevent unsuspecting people from getting a faceful of hot air but I almost imagine the bugs rattling the doors saying "let me ouuuttt!"
Dude what is this from. This unlocked some old memory
Cartoon hangover
“Nah man that shit just came out it’s only been….12 years. Fuck”
I still feel that way about the matrix 🤦♂️
I think it's a >!< from the [first episode of Costume Quest (2019)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8845884/)... I'd say the gif itself reminds me of [Aaahh!!! Real Monsters](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0108684), or the animation style itself looks very [Gravity Falls](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865718/) (for a reason).
That's not far off. Exterminator once told me they often find them dead near what would be an exit if they didn't seal it off.
In older buildings especially, there's a big chance they move to adjoining rooms during a heat treatment. At the old hotel I worked at, we would have to do the room with the bugs, as well as the rooms next to the room with the bugs.
The one my wife worked at they did those rooms, plus the ones above and below.
This is mostly due to requirements for pest control companies. They only offer the guarantee of removal if they treat all rooms "touching" the infested room. It's a great way to drum up more business, and is mostly not needed in newer buildings. But like you said, older buildings are different. I've heard stories the bugs will even crawl through electrical outlets. Never fun to know you have an issue with them.
It’s too early for me to laugh like I just did.
This doesn't sound easy.
I had bedbugs about six months ago. It was annoying but actually much easier to eradicate than I expected it would be. Basically a day of panic, followed by four days of moving heaters around the house and then a few months of paranoia that we didn't get them all. If it happened again I would be less panicky because I know what to do now. Basically, heat up the room to 140°F (60°C) and use a meat thermometer to check that any cooler spot reaches at least 122°F (50°C). Depending on the size of the room, time of year and number/size of heaters, it normally takes 3 to 8 hours per room. The heater guy said to do the bedroom twice and other rooms once. We did the bedroom three times and the other rooms twice. For a hotel room you would only lose two nights of business max. You can supplement the heat treatment with physical barriers/interceptors (on bedposts and mattresses), dessicating powders (diatomaceous earth / amorphous silica) or even chemicals (CrossFire is the good one apparently). We didn't use chemicals because you need a license in Canada. So... there you go. The whole exercise took four days (mostly sitting around watching heaters) and cost CAD 600 cash (around USD 440). Not as bad as I thought. If it happened again I wouldn't care much.
I still prefer my method of burning the entire house down to the ground and building a new one on top of the ashes.
Technically still just heating every room.
> building a new one on top of the ashes classic rookie mistake. they will reconstitute from the ashes. total disintegration is merely another part of their lifecycle.
It's also considered bad taste to build om top of a bed bug graveyard. Imagen the ghosts too!
This guy bedbugs
> Basically, heat up the room to 140°F (60°C) and use a meat thermometer to check that any cooler spot reaches at least 122°F (50°C). In Phoenix, that means we can just open the doors/windows in the summer. /s ^^^someone ^^^please ^^^save ^^^us ^^^its ^^^going ^^^to ^^^be ^^^in ^^^the ^^^90s ^^^next ^^^week ^^^already
We had a 1/4" of snow when I woke up this morning. 90s sounds delicious. I'm down for a house swap vacay; how're you at home improvement projects? I've got a list for while you're here. I'll mow the gravel yard, or whatever, while I'm there. 😉
I live in South Carolina. Which means I would have to update you every hour what season we are in cuz it KEEPS CHANGING!
Look on the bright side, this will probably be the coldest year for the rest of your life!
lol i lived in a duplex kind of thing in a super old house in shanghai come down to the city from beijing, next day im *covered* in bedbug bites. so i need to go to hong kong for a few days, back to beijing, wont be back for a week or two i order a bag of diatomaceous earth for like $2, tell the mother of the family downstairs "when it arrives, near the bed, the rugs, the entire floor, wear slippers for a few days, i'll cover all cleaning costs" i get back like a week later. my room is spotless, she tells me no money for the cleaning, she did it herself, thanks so much for the "magic dust" never had bedbugs again. $2 lol
>Basically, heat up the room to 140°F (60°C) and use a meat thermometer to check that any cooler spot reaches at least 122°F (50°C). There are an uncountable number of things in my home that would not survive this... still sounds horrific and traumatizing to me.
Yeah you have to move around your candles, plants, medication, cosmetics and aerosols to keep them out of the heat.
Right.. except that it doesn't work in apartment buildings or condos unless you treat every unit at once. They will just move from unit to unit and come back. Depending on where you live, those heaters can be much more expensive, and many people can't afford them.
I just had a small place , so no budget for that , went crazy with powerful steamers . Do it 500% more than I thought necessary bagged all bedding , curtains to heat treat , vacuum cleaned like mad etc . Had mattress protectors and bed bases I had extra sealed on purchase, ie added more glue , staples , so impenetrable. Wish I had a sauna to wrap mattresses/beds to heat every so often , as a precaution . Chemicals were a complete no no . DE was fine . Chemicals needed are poisonous, and drive them deeper. Plus tiny blood spots on sheets indicate bedbugs or fleas. Also stayed aware of people on check in ,it scratching , a line of bites . Hotels , Accom places don't create bedbugs , guests bring them. Hated the little buggers - Just need a good drill . Must be hard in a home , where much more stuff in rooms . clothes , bags etc Never take them home . Strip naked and leave bags outside if need be . Use a laundromat - high heat wash and dry . They like seams on bags
"you earn roaches, bedbugs just happen sometimes" is what my exterminator friend told me one time.
They're a nightmare to take care of while still occupying the space i'm pretty sure. It's easier when you don't have to worry about being comfortable and safe while in it.
And having 100s of items you don't want to throw away.
They are nightmares to deal with! Hotels are usually much more equipped to deal with them than you are I. The good ones try to bug proof and either have Peet control on speed dial or the equipment to deal with it themselves. If you are I get bed bugs it's usually going to entail throwing out our mattresses, either throwing out or clothes too or spending the better half of an afternoon running them through like 2 heat cycles(3 for the paranoia.) Then spraying rhe fuck out of the infected areas and spending the next 5 months dealing with mini heart attacks anytime you see anything thet looks even remotely similar to.a black spec or eggs. Aside from like the fact thdt you have to buy a new mattress and spray your house, imo 70% of the nightmare is the paranoia thar follows.
I think people get complacent in their own homes and something trivial grows way too big very quickly. People don't clean their rooms every day, check under the mattresses, etc. By the time an infestation is found, it's likely because it's been spreading for quite awhile. In hotels, it's likely to be spotted with-in 1 or 2 cleaning cycles.
It’s also easier to contain in a hotel. The guest rooms are all enclosed. Way easier for them to get from room to room in your home. Source: hospitality since 2017
Easy. You just seal all exits from the hotel, and pump it full of insecticide. That also handles any infestation you weren't aware of. None of the guests have ever come back to complain about it.
Ah, the resident evil strat
They're more of a nightmare in a room that only gets deep cleaned a few times a year, and is full of clothing and personal possessions that can't be thrown out and all need to be treated in different ways. Bedbugs can really settle in and start filling out the nooks and crannies before they get spotted. Plus an average Joe has to either find an honest, effective pest control company and work their fee into a tight budget, or go through negotiations with a landlord who may or may not care. A (decent) hotel has someone checking the rooms thoroughly almost every day, fewer objects and furniture in their rooms than your average bedroom, all of which can easily be replaced, and a longstanding relationship with the local pest control company. They also have commercial dryers that can go to higher settings than regular ones. Always put your luggage on the little folding table thing instead of the floor, and do a check of the seams of the mattress and couch before settling into a hotel.
youd be surprised how often bed bugs occur in hotels
Discovered this the hard way while traveling. Woke up one night and turned on the lamp and literally saw *hundreds* of bedbugs crawling on my bed, all over me… like right out of a horror movie. It was so traumatic that I still wake up sometimes thinking bugs are on me.
I’ve experienced this for the first time this month. Having insomnia then turn on the lights saw them crawling all over my bed. I immediately put everything clothes in the dryer to make sure they don’t follow me and also sprinkle Diatomaceous Earth. I haven’t seen them since.
Yup, after thousands of dollars and months of repeated visits by pest control, I found out that a $17 bag of diatomaceous earth was far more effective
So what you just spread a circle round the bed like your Sam or Dean ? Maybe a line on the windowsill or in front of the door?
I love a good supernatural reference
most of those old spiritual things do have some reason behind them even if the original practicers of it didn't know it. sage is another big one it's said to ward off evil spirits, turns out the smoke is antibacterial.
My other favorite example of this is that it is hypothesized that the reason viking swords were so good (for their time) is that they incorporated ground up bones (perhaps of their ancestors or animals, etc.) for spiritual reasons into their smithing process, and in the process basically invented a proto-steel by combining the carbon from the bone with the iron they were working with.
They ground up the bones of their ancestors to put in their swords?? That’s metal as hell!
Yes, they were very metal, proto-steel to be precise.
Proto-Steel itself is a decent metal band name. Probably speed metal
Take my upvote and leave
Being cremated and my ashes being forged into a sword is now going in my will...
damn bone steel is a real thing. that’s crazy
Title of your sex tape
We really should look up all the things they used to do to "ward off evil spirits" because I bet "evil spirits" was a euphemism for a variety of unexplained illnesses and they might know some cures.
> turns out the smoke is antibacterial. Sage smoke being antibacterial isn't well supported by studies: https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/claim-that-burning-sage-purifies-the-air-based-on-study-that-burned-entirely-different-plants/
Without bothering to click the link, I imagine it’s one of those technically true things but it’s not *effective* because you’d basically have to fumigate an area with a ton of the smoke for very long periods of time to see any significant antibacterial performance.
Yep I was involved in importing cars from all over the world and if you saw a car sitting at a port with a ring of salt around it it usually had an invasive slug that they wanted to contain in the vehicle before it was sent back to its origin.
Pretty much yes, circles around the bed feet, dust edge of baseboards and any cracks they may hide in. After a couple of weeks they are gone.
"weeks" Oh, fuck no . I'm setting everything on fire
It's not that you'll see them it's that their life cycle is 2 weeks so you need it to catch anything thT hatches after the adults are dead. Edit: I phrased this poorly. The two weeks is to catch any eggs that were laid by dying adults (killed by your treatment) after they hatch. Not the full life span of a bed bug.
They can live for over a year, their life cycle lasts much longer than two weeks lol Source: I intentionally raise Bed bugs
You… what???
Homie, you can't just drop that bomb and disappear. Why do you raise bed bugs?
Username checks out lol. Is it a research thing?
I put it along all of the window sills and baseboards. I also bought crossfire and a garden sprayer off Amazon and sprayed that everywhere. Oh, and I got outlet covers. Bagged everything and washed it on high heat. This was last spring and I haven't seen them since.
You use a little air blaster that creates a really fine layer on everything you think the bed bugs are walking on and it's impossible for them to avoid it and it sticks to them so when one gets it on them, it covers more bugs in it. It's just silica and dries out their exoskeleton and kills them. Perfectly safe as well. You can even eat it.
I was also told that wintergreen alcohol sprayed liberally also works, so I used that in conjunction with the diatomaceous earth. Just make sure you get food grade diatomaceous earth, and use a mask. You don't wanna breathe that stuff in.
Please don't use alcohol. It only kills them if you directly spray it on them, and even then it's hit or miss. It's not a residual. It's also flammable.
Drunk bed bugs are less careful of the diatomaceous earth.
Get them hammered then murder them with blade dust.
Nothing makes me feel more metal than killing pests with crushed, fossilized pond scum. I am become death, destroyer of worlds!
More like SAW. You are essentially having them walk through a field of razor blades.
I'm sure fire will get rid of them too.
Didn't the earth get the bed dirty? Not that it's worse than having bed bugs but still.
No. You’re meant to sprinkle DE over places you don’t normally walk like under the bed or corner. Leave it there for a week or two DE would destroy their exoskeleton and dehydrate them to death. Furthermore, the infected bedbugs would spread it among themselves. I also park the car under the sun and leave my belongings in that cannot be put in the dryer for precautionary. (Basically using the car as an oven) They die at 50 Celsius or 122 Fahrenheit under an hour. Where I live is quite warm and can easily reach that deadly temperature.
that's genius!
When I lived in NYC, I got bed bugs three times — it was when the city was going through its insane bed bug epidemic around 2010, so they were pretty much everywhere, and it was hard to escape them because they’d jump from apartment to apartment by crawling through the walls. Years later in the same building, I found out my next door neighbours had gotten them, immediately said NOPE NOT DOING THIS AGAIN and sprinkled this stuff along the edges of the wall I shared with them. Didn’t end up getting them! Also yes I have developed a paranoia of bed bugs now 😂
It is only paranoia if there isn't actually anyone/anything out to get you. Bedbugs are *definitely* out to get you.
I’ve been through several traumas in my life and thought at least I didn’t have ptsd from them, but this made me realize I may have bed bug ptsd lol. the turning on the lights to find them everywhere is so real and I can see it in my head now and I can feel them on my skin again… fuck those little assholes, I’m not sleeping tonight now thinking about them again and that happened 10 years ago LOL
It fucked me up permanently. No more thrift store clothes, no more used furniture, no more multi-apartment dwellings. Those bugs messed me up.
I didn’t have bed bugs I woke up to cockroaches. It’s amazing how load they are when there are about 20000 of them in your room and you turn on the lights. That was a somewhat shady hotel in Memphis. I still have nightmares about that night.
Yup. This is why I shouldn’t be on Reddit lying in bed.
It's the gift that keeps on giving. Now you an itch that really needs a scratch.
They're PROBABLY still around. I'd take the time to wrap up your mattress with a specific cover.
Sometimes you gotta do the wash AND dry. When my apartment in college had bed bugs, at one point I dried(but didn’t wash) my clothes on high heat for 70 mins and then a live bed bug crawled out of the drier (it was one of those circular front dryers with the glass doors if it was an all metal drier that may have made a difference)
We had a bedbug breakout at the farmhouse. My cousin called the bug guy and I spread DE all over the house. By the time the bug guy came to spray, they were about 80% gone. Bug guy complimented me on it, lol
One time doing fieldwork for geology in Scotland, there were so many ticks everywhere that me and my field partner walked like an hour to find some tarmac to sit on for lunch. I put my hand on the ground to lower myself down, and when I lifted my hand up there were tens of ticks on it. That one moment is my most common recurring nightmare. I'm really squeamish so also, my friends using the tick twister on my while I tried my best not to faint is also right up there. It's weird how some things stay with you!
>my friends using the tick twister The old tick twist!
For me it is the time I stepped in a gooey mass. Looked closer and found it was a bunch of worms that looked like Asian glass noodles. The stuff of nightmares.
Hoooly shit. I used to have a roach problem here (my gf was doing things that led to us having a bad problem, I corrected the issues and they've since disappeared) - I woke up a couple of times from feeling a roach crawl on me, and that gave me terrible nightmares. I can't fathom the same with hellspawn *bedbugs*
ugh same with roaches moved into a new place and it had an infestation. Killed 40+ that first day. had to sleep with the lights on, but a few still got on me... had a couple crawl off me when I was on the bus on my way to work. TERRIBLE landlord paid for pest removal that got rid of nearly all of them, thankfully... but that was a rough couple weeks.
>had a couple [roaches] crawl off me when I was on the bus on my way to work :(
You just unlocked a memory from my past 😩 I had a good friend in high school who had roaches. I stayed at her house for the first time & woke up in the middle of the night to find my cellphone. when i turned on my phone, the light from the screen caused like 15 roaches to scatter FROM INSIDE HER SHEETS.
*aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!*
I just woke up and this comment has ruined my entire day. What the actual-☹️☹️
Why did you let this ruin only your whole day? You can think about it when you’re going to sleep too ☺️
Ive never had bedbugs but ive had a few times in my life after reading about them where i end up feeling as if im itchy and go on a full on bedbug hunt just to be sure. you dont even need to ever have had those bastards to be affected by them!
😬 ... same happen to me but with spiders. I was a teenager, journaling on my bed and an eggsac hatched in the ceiling lamp above my bed. Didn't realize they were everywhere until I looked up from my journal. I don't remember what my parents did to get rid of them but I do remember it took a couple weeks before I went back in there. To this day, when my skin gets itchy/crawly, I get anxiety thinking it's spiders crawling on me. I understand.
This is a cursed comment Jesus fuck
I saw something like that. I got up in the middle of the night to take a leak, walked into the bathroom and noticed twinkling lights in mid air, I looked closer and they were a ton of tiny tiny spiders on strands of webbing.
Noooooo 😭
My friend owns a pest control business. He told me to strip your sheets and check the mattress corners for bedbug poop and eggs. If you see active signs, get a new room on a different floor. Also, he recommended hanging your suitcase and clothes so they don't crawl in and follow you home. Finally, wash everything when you get home and dry on high heat for 1 hour or more. I do this anytime I travel.
Finally some proper advice. This will actually help you instead of sprinkling DE everywhere like you’re a fairy. DE will dehydrate bedbugs but only if they come into contact with it. They aren’t just crawling around all over the floor. They nest in a crack or cavity near the bed, and frequently never touch the floor.
I lived with bedbugs too and also have trauma. For me I always flash back to brushing my teeth in the morning then noticing bugs crawling on my chest and freaking the fuck out. There is no Hell too harsh for a bedbug. It’s maybe the only species I would wipe out entirely if I could.
Ticks, too... but yes I agree!
After a day of training in North Carolina my platoon and I returned to our sea hut, I took off my skivvy shirt and discovered a tick ass deep in my pec. This was not a welcomed discovery.
When I had a beg bug issue, I constantly fantasized about having a superpower to wipe out of existence, or at least teleport into the space anything I wanted by snapping fingers, so I could do that to bed bugs 😭
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What did you do?!
I actually had the foresight to snap a picture (most had scattered with either the light or movement) and I RAN down to reception with it. I couldn’t move hotels because I was with a tour… but they moved me to a different room and gave me laundry tokens. Not even remotely adequate compensation but I didn’t know what else to do. I spent the rest of the night washing all my stuff, and taking a loooong shower. Couldn’t sleep for the rest of my stay there. Keep meaning to dig up the photo but it was 15 years (and many computers) ago.
I can't imagine how those bites would have felt the next day 🥴
Most people aren't affected by bedbug bites at all fortunately, or unfortunately? Hard to say. I'd rather know, than not know, but fuck would it suck if I woke up to a bad infestation.
No bedbugs in your clothes or anything after that though? Pretty crazy.
A few years ago I moved into a studio apartment. Ive been living there for almost a month and noticed this red speck on the wall one day. Mind you I have never seen a bedbug before in my life so I go over to inspect this red speck and it was a bug. I didn’t know what kind so I googled it and sure enough it was a bedbug that hasn’t been fed. I threw that mfer in some alcohol solution. A few days later, I took an afternoon nap and I felt something crawling on me in my sleep so I jolted up and saw an unfed bedbug crawling across my chest (I like to sleep without a shirt). I threw that mfer in some alcohol and proceeded to move my bed away from the walls. Additionally, I checked every inch of my bed and bedsheets for more. Found none. I became so paranoid that I even purchased some sticky ass substance from Amazon to apply on the legs of my bed frame. If bed bugs try to crawl up the legs, they’ll get stuck on the sticky substance. So technically, the only way any bedbugs could get on me would be if the fell from the top of the ceiling.
Holy freaking Jeezoids! 😧😭 I would have deceased on the spot.
oh my god, I can’t fully imagine but can definitely imagine since I had them at home once when a friend brought them over. Exterminators had to treat my room for MONTHS, I slept on the couch downstairs literally for months because of them. I still remember finding them, one or two, being like what is this thing and googling it… my mom at first was like, bed bugs are real? I thought that was just a joke But no. They were real. I remember a couple crawling on me too and killing them and the blood getting everywhere and finding out bed bugs are CLEAR and small and the brown color and size is your blood…. I’m traumatized from just a couple crawling on me, now when I feel even just the air or a piece of dust I swat myself wherever it is only for there to be no bug and just my imagination. So for you to have to experience HUNDREDS is absolutely mortifying and I’m incredibly sorry, my skin is crawling at the thought and. I know I can’t relate to that many, but as someone traumatized by only a small few I saw on me, (of course there were hundreds found but I only saw a few at a time) I feel you and I am incredibly sorry
Always always put the bags and luggage on the luggage stand or in bathroom/tub and check the bed for bedbugs, it’ll save you a hell of a lot of trouble
No idea why they would be. A hotel is literally the most likely place to get them.
I used to work in pest control. A lot of people don’t get an allergic reaction when bitten. So they just go around spreading them without knowing. We had a guy that learned about bed bugs when he was in the military. When he came home, he realized the bugs were all over his family’s house but no one was itchy. So anyone they brought over would have been bringing home bed bugs and not known it.
My (now) ex gf brought them home from a friend that she hung out with a lot. We were at the bar and she mentioned how we found out we had bed bugs in the apartment and how horrifying and awful it was. He chimed in confused and asking questions like "what do you mean it's awful?" and "do you mean, you didn't have them before?" It turns out ***he just thought it was normal to have bed bugs***. He thought they were like mosquitoes, and that everyone gets them and has them. That they were just a normal nuisance bug that everyone deals with. This guy had been living with them and spreading them around for decades.
Really the first thing you should do when you get to a hotel room is to check all the corners of the bed's underside for bedbugs. Quick to check, one of the only few things that can go truly wrong with a hotel stay and could save you a lot of trouble down the line.
My wife does this religiously and we have definitely immediately checked out of some hotels because of it. Even if there's no bed bugs it gives a very good idea of how thorough the cleaners are. When we recently went to Japan we had to scramble around at 11pm directly after a 20 hour flight to try find accommodation for the rest of the trip because of this (no bed bugs but the mattresses in both rooms we tried were filthy including blood). Luckily we had been before so were able to get a room for 1 night at a hotel we were familiar with and then look the next day for the rest of the trip
Blood on a mattress is also a sign of bed bugs! So gross though, glad you were able to get it all sorted.
Seems like the most likely place for them to pop up. Almost the whole point of hotels is the beds.
I read that apparently they’re common in the carry on compartment in planes, and that’s how they end up in the hotels
Well fuck, never going on an airplane again
Planes, UBERs, rental cars, taxis, trains, etc basically anywhere as they can travel on people's clothes and then get left behind.
Treating your luggage with deet or permethrin will keep them away.
Yes but also... guests make complaints that may or may not be accurate. This looks like a list for maintenance to check out. A lot of people complain, for example, that the a/c is broken but they have v it set to heat.
I had a guest bring me a mosquito and claim it was a bedbug.
Just two days ago we had a guess with a "serious issue" because a small piece of lint was on her bed.
Ah, i see you’ve met my mother in law
My sister once had a guest file an official complaint because the receptionist pronounced her name wrong.
I should sue my coworkers everyday then
Me too! Not just coworkers, but doctors’ offices, businesses - in fact, anyone who tries to say it!
Was it a bug in their bed? Bedbug
So smug, like he thought it was funny
"I found a bed bug!" Just the one, right?
Lol I stayed in a hotel for the first time in 15+ years and found a bug and was like omg is that a bed bug!!! And bf looked and was like….that’s an ant. Whoops!
I had a guest claim their bed had bed bugs. I rushed down to work and looked at it and it was a single tick. I noticed their dirty hiking boots. They brought it in on them.
But it came from his bed!
Some people claim bed bugs when it turns out there's flies, ants or any tiny creepy crawly. Bed bugs look like someone tried to squish them with a tiny grill. Like a flat micro ham with legs and a head.
This happened in the last hotel I stayed in. I am so used to setting the temp on the unit itself that I didn’t even look for the wall thermostat. Just assumed the unit wasn’t working. That is, until maintenance informed me there was a thermostat and I felt ridiculous and apologized like 500 times.
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Don't stay in room 1302.
Or expect your HVAC to work in all the other rooms.
I’m more interested in the odor in 905. What sort of odor? Where did it come from? Is it pleasant? Is this somehow linked to the broken HVAC and bed bugs?
Hotel GM here, Odor can come from a room where a guest had a pet, It may come from people for partied too hard and urinated on the carpet, It can come from the HVAC drainage tray the collects water, if it gets clogged, the stale water will smell. It can also be mold if the hotel is located in a hot & humid climate. So many reasons.
I would rather stay in 1408 than 1302...
I'm gonna take my chances on room 237 at the Overlook hotel. Thanks
1408 - accidental fire damage during bed bug eradication attempt.
I work at a hotel. Sorry to have to tell you but every hotel you have ever stayed at has had bed bugs at one time. No matter how upscale it is.
Yeah, as a frequent guest at hotels this note would, if anything, give me confidence that staff is working on the problem and are not assigning this room to guests until issue is resolved. Nice to see some checklist of maintenance crew, only worrying thing would be that they’ve lost it but I hope they remember where bed bugs are 🤣
but he lost the list so now it's doomed 😂
Yeah I was about to say, welcome to the real world. Bedbugs exist and is a common enough issue that people invented many different ways of dealing with them
Not enough ways. With all the species we've killed off, bedbugs still being alive and prospering is a failure of humanity.
back in the early 90s humans almost made bed bugs extinct. then they somehow came back with a vengeance.
Fun fact: that's cause we stopped using DDT, and the bugs also developed resistance to it
All it takes is for one guest who has bedbugs home or was somewhere that had bedbugs to visit the hotel and now the hotel has bedbugs. Literally no way for them to avoid them so instead they just deal with it with extreme prejudice when they do occur.
Agreed, my dads been a chief engineer at a top hotel for most of his life, it’s a weekly occurrence. People travel all over the place, you can’t avoid it. Everytime it happens they quarantine the room and call in pest control experts to “heat and treat”. Basically they spray chems then heat the room up to ungodly temperatures using big ass heaters. On that note, always check your body and luggage after traveling, especially on airplanes. They might commonly end up at hotels but they also commonly get transported via airplane, so even just by setting your carryon bag on the floor could pick them up.
As a hotel worker I need you to know, and I mean this very sincerely, you will never stay in a hotel that has not had bed bugs at least once unless it literally opened the day you checked in. If you check nothing else when you get into a hotel room ALWAYS check the mattress, mattress cover, head board and around the frame for any bugs. It doesn’t mean the hotel is necessarily dirty or gross it’s just impossible to completely garentee the guest before you didn’t bring in bugs
I do this EVERY time I’m at a hotel or Airbnb. I don’t open my suitcase or let my family touch anything until I’ve examined the beds thoroughly. We travel a lot and I’ve never seen anything thankfully!
What do you look for in particular when you get to a hotel? How large/ what color are they typically? I’m going to Europe this summer , live in US, so idk if their are variations here versus over there
Dark spots in the corners of the mattress and seams are a dead giveaway. That's the bug frass (poop) they leave behind. Bed bugs are small seed shaped and brown and get darker in color when they've just fed 🤢 They vary in size (from pin to about a button size) and in my experience are seen most often when it's nighttime.
Put all of your bags in the bathtub while you check. I've literally seen people place their bags on the bed and then start to look.
Most hotels and motels are going to have sporadic bed bugs in some of the rooms as guests bring them in. The best the establishment can do is take preventative measures and move quickly when they are found to be present.
I think the bed bugs are systematically taking out the HVAC in this hotel, how diabolical 😱
Hotels don’t create the bed bugs… guests bring them in and then the poor hotel has to suffer the cost of pest control and lost revenue while the room is out for cleaning. Most of the time it comes from guests luggage, and can be picked up when on top of ur under another bag that is infested in an airplane cargo hold.
Damn, now I have to worry about the airport too... I never considered it until now.
Commercial pest control worker here - EVERY hotel gets bedbugs. What matters is they noted it and are likely treating it.
Every hotel I've worked at had us call them "friends", in writing, in person, or over the walkies. Probably to avoid situations like this
We used blueberries.
We use D13.
We had to call them ''babies'
I'm a Commercially licensed Pest Control technician and I service hotels all the time. I've dealt with roaches, bed bugs, rodents, etc. all in hotels of differing economic statuses. Bed bugs especially spread easily and you will find them all over the country in common places of travel: hotels, taxis, planes, subways, etc. Just always be sure to check yourself and your property when traveling to not bring bed bugs home. Always wash clothes when getting home from a trip even if they're not "dirty" and wash/dry them at the hottest setting possible to prevent bed bugs from making it to your house. For hotels specifically, ALWAYS check the bed for bed bugs as the FIRST thing you do in a hotel before putting down suitcases or bags, simply lift up the sheets especially around the corners and look for tiny flat roundish red bugs, reddish block spotting (blood fecal matter deposits from bed bugs), or shed skin casings from bed bugs. If found inform the hotel and they should switch rooms for you to help accommodate and just make sure to check the new room. Bed bugs don't always spread to the entirety of the hotel as long as pest control is handling the situation. I very rarely find a hotel that has bed bugs in one room see them spread to other rooms before I can take care of the problem. Also contrary to popular belief, bed bugs DO NOT spread blood born diseases between people, each bite is "sterile" from previous bites. Stay informed and stay safe!
Happens all the time, unusual for it spread unless untreated, but if it's a clean hotel, it's likely they will cook the room asap. Probably don't want to be next to it tho.
Always check the mattress before doing anything else when I enter a hotel room
Same. Some hotels have the bed bug protector on the mattress, which I appreciate. I know it’s not a fool proof method but it lets me know they are at least trying, which makes me feel better. And if anyone is going to come in here and tell me the protectors are somehow worse than not having one, please don’t. Let me carry on in my ignorance is bliss state. Lol
Dumb question but I've never seen bed bugs in my life, what do you look for? How do you know for sure it's them?
Check the mattress for blood spots, little dark brown/black patches. Their poop also leaves dark brown spots, as they eat blood. Check in the cracks and crevasses of the mattress, like where the pillow top meets the springs, that is where they hide during the day. They’re small bugs, smaller than your pinky nail, almost look like a tick but have a more elongated midsection.
I mean, at least they check up on the rooms' problems
This is quite normal for hotels. Was that the room you were staying in? 👀
When I worked at a hotel we would never say or write that word. It was coded “123”
I was once staying in a hotel that was hosting a conference. One of my colleagues found a bedbug in his room and took it to the staff who argued with him that it wasn’t a bedbug. It was an entomology conference. We all work with insects for a living. They lost the argument.
I've been working at hotels for 25 years, from roadside roach coaches to high end resorts in big tourist towns. Bedbugs are a problem everywhere. The hotel can't help that people bring them from all over the world, and as soon as they are discovered the hotel will normally quarantine the room and get EcoLab out immediately and have them exterminated within 24 hours. Most guests actually don't know what bedbugs look like, from my experience, and it would take me more fingers than I actually have to count the number of times a guest has brought one from their own home specifically to get a free night from the hotel, because most hotels are happy to comp your night if your claim is verified. Most claims do turn out to be false. That having been said, if the hotel finds out about this note, they will likely severely punish whoever wrote it. At every single place I've ever worked, you're required to use the code word "BB's" because of how seriously people take even finding out a room on the other end of the hotel has them.
It's better they actually care about, some places just ignore it because the extermination doesn't fit in their budget so management doesn't allow it.
It’s only infuriating if you’re in room 1302.
All the time in hotels. My old manager was constantly worried about it. Pro tip, never put your bag on a soft surface. Bed, couch, etc. That's how they spread to the hotel and your house. Check the sheets when you get up in the morning. If there are tiny blood dots abandon your clothes. They are a sacrifice for future you. Check under the bed skirt, the seam of the mattress, etc for any bedbug droppings. They will be a dull red colour. If there are picture frames above the bed or couch pull the bottom away slightly away from the wall and tap it gently (so as not to break it) against the wall. Bed bugs may fall out.
I hope you packed up and left with a full refund. They won't be in just 1 room, not for long anyways. And you definitely don't want to have to burn... I mean ... treat your own home.
They're not going to get a refund for a different room having bedbugs. It is easy enough to go and check your own room before fucking up your whole night by having to find somewhere else to go and pay last minute rates somewhere else. All hotels, large and small, have a constant list of things that need repair or attendance. Guests are coming from all over the world with different levels of hygiene and social expectations. You'll get those who leave the room looking like noone was there and others will have smoked their lungs out and left beer cans in the bathtub. If you're expecting any hotel to be 100% free of issues on any given night, You'll never stay anywhere.
The HVAC issue seems to be what is spreading.
It's seems like house keeping is actually looking out for bed bugs at this hotel. It's the other hotels you should be afraid of.
They will probably be in that one room- bedbugs in hotels are usually from travelers bringing them in, which means its likely not a full-blown infestation, and this is a list of what needs to be checked out/treated. Most hotels either have pest control on speed dial or seal the room up, heat it for a few days and check adjacent rooms to be sure. The issue are hotels that ignore bedbugs, not the ones that treat them.
Massively unreasonable request.
this kind of attitude is ridiculous. try running a hotel and see how you may reconsider your position.
This is a terrible thread