How to Scan Your Hotel for Bed Bugs on Your Summer Vacation

Your hard-earned vacation has arrived, your bags are packed and some excellent relaxation is waiting. But the last thing you want for yourself and your family is to encounter a hotel with a bed bug problem. Let’s look at some effective ways to determine if your hotel is a home for these pests.

Inspection tips

You’ll need a flashlight, or the flashlight feature of your phone. Use your phone to take photos of anything suspicious. Bed bugs gather near their human food source and defecate after feeding, creating tell-tale brown stains of your clotted blood. You typically won’t see bed bugs themselves because they’re fairly tiny and can scurry quickly, but you will see these stains.

Put your luggage in the bathtub when you arrive. Luggage is a major way that bed bugs transport themselves. The bathroom has the fewest places for bed bugs to hide, and is the most vigorously cleaned part of a hotel room.

Do a thorough room inspection. Pull the bed away from the wall if possible. Headboards fastened to the wall next to the bed are a great place for a bed bug to hide. Shine your flashlight behind headboards and under beds. Strip the bed, right down to the mattress and bed springs to see what’s underneath the sheets and mattress pad. Lift the mattress and box springs up and look underneath.  If it’s a platform bed, inspect carefully under the springs and around the base. Pay special attention to the seams of mattresses and the box springs. These are spots that bed bugs like to hide in.

Inspect along the edging, seams and other small areas of the mattress and box spring. Continue your inspection with the headboard.

Next, inspect the furniture around the bed, and any pictures hanging on the wall. Bed bugs are known to hide behind framed pictures and around or on furniture. Make sure you inspect all the cracks and crevices of the night stand, including screw holes, joints and in the drawers. Once you have insured that these areas do not have bed bugs move on to other furniture in the room, especially upholstered chairs and their under-sides. As you’re inspecting, pay special attention to the seams.

If you find bed bugs in your hotel room, notify the front desk immediately and ask to be moved to a new room, which is not next door to the room where you found the bugs.

Check your sheets the next morning. When you get up the next morning, look for little blood stains or tiny rusty spots on your sheets. Reactions to bed bug bites vary widely, from no reaction at all to lots of swelling and redness.  You may be one of the people that doesn’t react with itching to the bed bug bites, so the presence of bites isn’t always a reliable check. Bed bugs sometimes bite in groups of three – but so do fleas, so that isn’t always definitive. Don’t use luggage racks, closet shelves, or drawers during your stay unless you feel confident that they are bed bug free.

These tools for bed bug inspection can help make the difference between an unpleasant stay and a really great vacation.