Welcome to your hotel room. Set your bags down. No, not where you plan to sleep. Over there, on the floor. You’re probably tired and want to lie down, but don’t take a load off yet. It’s time for an inspection. If you skip it, you could become a chew stick for bloodthirsty bedbugs.
Ben Hottel from Orkin shows how to look for bedbugs in a hotel room and demonstrates what a professional inspector would do. “They only crawl, which is good news,” Hottel said. “If they could jump and fly, we’d be in trouble.”The strongest proof of an infestation is to find a living bug, a rusty-brown adult the size of an apple seed or a white youngster as tiny as a freckle. Other evidence includes their exoskeletons, eggs, dots of blood or dark spots that represent fecal matter. However, Hottel warned of misdiagnosing the black specks. They could also be coffee stains from breakfast in bed.
“They don’t like a lot of activity, so they are going to go to places where they are the least disturbed, in those cracks,” he said. “If they are on the top of the mattress, they could get smooshed.”If the mattress is sealed in plastic, he said to not unzip it. The cover is a defense against bedbugs.
Overall, the search should not take more than five to 10 minutes. However, if you are still concerned, you can expand your search parameters to the nightstand drawers, bedside lamps, headboards and any framed artwork hanging by the bed. “You wouldn’t want to go to the room right next door or the surrounding rooms,” Hottel said, “but in hotels where people are staying a few nights or a week, generally the bedbug issue wouldn’t get bad enough to have a huge spread issue.”If you wake up with bites, share your concerns with hotel management, but don’t immediately assume the culprit was a bedbug. Hottel said it’s nearly impossible to identify a bug by a bite. Manylook similar, and people react differently to bedbug nips.