What To Do If You Find Bed Bugs In Your Hotel Room
Finding bed bugs in your hotel room is something that happens more than you think. What you do after you find bed bugs is very important to reduce the risk of bringing home these unwanted pests. The following article discusses what to do and how to handle hotel management.
Bed bugs have nothing to do with how clean or nice your hotel room is. Bed bugs can be found in the cheapest motels or the nicest 4-star resorts. Bed bugs feed off of us and have no concern or preference from a clean room or a dirty one. This being said its important to treat every hotel stay as if there may be bed bugs in side the room.
We suggest inspecting the hotel room for the presence of bed bug before bringing in your belongings. This includes inspecting the seams of the mattress for possible fecal specs or blood spotting (indicative of bed bugs). Also check along the headboards, which are normally screwed to the wall and are a hot spot for bed bugs if present.
Surprising enough most rooms will appear to bed bug free even after a detailed inspection as bed bugs are good at hiding inside deep crack where they may impossible to see. Bd bugs are also very small with the early stage bed bugs being almost translucent in appearance.
- Once you believe the room is free of bed bugs we suggest keeping the suitcases in the bathtub to reduce the odds of having your personal belongings infested. During showers simply stack your suitcases on top of the toilet or free areas of the bathroom (ask for extra towels to dry up the bathtub when you finish so your stuff doesn't get wet).
- Do not put your clothing inside the hotel room's dressers or use any of the rooms drawers to organize your belongings. This can expose your belongs to infested furniture increasing the chances of bringing home a hitchhiker.
- If you wake up throughout the night quickly turn the light on to see if there are any bugs on your body or the sheets (this is a good time to see them when they are most active).
What to do if you see a bed bug.
If you find a bed bug in your hotel room before you bring in your belongings we suggest notifying hotel management immediately. Put any found bed bugs into a sealed container such as an empty pillow bottle, ziploc bag, etc. This is important so that you have proof of your claim making it easier to deal with hotel management. Depending on how the hotel staff responds to your find we would either choose another upgraded room on a different part of the hotel property or ask for a refund and checkout. These are both very fair remedies for the issue and should be accepted by the hotel.
If you find bed bugs during the first night of your stay or the first several nights we would again capture evidence of your infestation as mentioned above. The entire stay should refunded back to you no matter how much it cost per night. If it was $500 per night and you staid 3 nights they should willingly refund you $1500. This is fair given the bites you most likely incurred as well as the risk you would be forced to accept in bringing bed bugs back to your home. Treating an infestation can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars leading to lost sleep, work and added stress.
Some hotels may attempt to offer you one free night on a multi-night stay, but we would not accept this. We would ask to speak with a managers and contact any hotel website such as Travelocity or Expedia for help if you need it. Credit card disputes should be a last resort as it take a long time and there is no guarantee your refund will be accepted. Bottom line is you should not have to pay for your stay.
We will be writing another article about what to do to prevent bringing home bed bugs from an infested hotel room in the coming days. If you have any further questions please feel free to write us a comment below or call us.
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