Hotel Bed Bugs: Catching Them Before A Guest Does

A hotel bed bug program comes down to three habits: housekeeping checking the same places on every turnover, a written record of what was checked and when, and a response to the first report that isolates the room instead of spraying it. Ohio law already requires the last part of that, in plain language, for every hotel in the state.

The reason it matters is arithmetic. One room with bed bugs in it, found by your own staff on a Tuesday, is a treatment and a night of lost revenue. The same room found by a guest is a treatment, a refund, a review that outlives the infestation, and a conversation with everybody who stayed in the rooms on either side. The infestation is the same size either way. Only the order of discovery changes.

How Often Does This Actually Happen To Hotels?

Often enough that the industry has numbers for it. The National Pest Management Association's Bugs Without Borders survey asks pest professionals where they find bed bugs, and lodging sits near the top of the list.

Read that table the right way round. It ranks where pest professionals get called out, not which buildings are dirtiest, and homes and apartments sit well ahead of lodging. What a hotel has that a house does not is a new occupant every night, each one arriving with a suitcase that spent the previous week somewhere nobody could inspect.

One more point from that survey belongs in your staff training rather than your marketing. It found that 84 percent of pest professionals had been called out for a different pest and found bed bugs when they arrived, and that 71 percent of those calls were about fleas. Front desk staff and housekeepers are not entomologists, and they should not be asked to be. Their job is to notice and escalate, not to name the insect.

What Does Ohio Law Require Of A Hotel?

Ohio names bed bugs specifically. Section 3731.13 of the Ohio Revised Code requires that all bedding used in any hotel be thoroughly aired, disinfected and kept clean, and states that no bedding infested with vermin or bed bugs shall be used on any bed in any hotel. The same section requires floors, carpets, equipment, walls and ceilings to be kept in sanitary condition.

That wording does more work than it looks like. It sets a standard about what goes back into service, which means a hotel needs some way of knowing. A property that has never looked at a mattress seam cannot honestly say whether the bedding in room 212 is infested. Ohio is not unusual here: the EPA notes that 21 states have some level of law or regulation that applies to bed bugs, and that those requirements focus mostly on hotels and on landlords and property managers. The EPA's own authority covers the pesticides, not the reporting.

Worth saying plainly, because it comes up with worried guests: the EPA, the CDC and the USDA all classify bed bugs as a public health pest, and they are not known to transmit disease. The problem they cause is bites, itching and lost sleep, plus the reputational damage that follows. That is a real problem, and it is a different kind of problem from a disease outbreak. A hotel pest management program should be built on the first framing and not the second.

Where Should Housekeeping Look?

The EPA publishes the list, and it is short enough to put on a laminated card. What staff are looking for is four things: rusty or reddish stains on sheets and mattresses from crushed bugs, dark spots of excrement, tiny pale yellow eggs and the shed skins that look like eggshells, and live insects.

• Mattress and box spring: the piping, the seams and the tags. This is the first place to look and the place a stripped bed exposes anyway.
• Bed frame and headboard: cracks in the joints, and the screw heads. A wall mounted headboard has to come off the wall to be checked properly.
• Upholstered furniture: seams and cushions of chairs and sofas, which is where an infestation that started at the bed tends to turn up second.
• Curtains and drawer joints: both get missed, and both are listed.
• The edges of the room: electrical plugs and appliances, under loose wallpaper, and the line where the walls meet the ceiling.
• The luggage rack: the EPA tells travelers to keep suitcases off the bed and on the rack, so the rack is exactly where a hitchhiker arrives and leaves.

Nobody can do all of that on every room, every day, and a program that pretends otherwise gets ignored in week two. Decide what gets the full version and what gets the quick version. The full check belongs on the rooms that turn over fastest, the rooms that had a long stay in them, and any room where a guest said anything at all about a bite. For the rest, the bed seam check on every strip is the habit that catches most of it. Early detection monitors under and around the beds in high turnover rooms do the watching between inspections, which is what commercial bed bug monitoring is for.

Why Not Just Keep A Spray In The Housekeeping Closet?

Because it does not work, and because of what it does instead. The EPA states that pesticides alone cannot eliminate bed bug infestations, and that control can only be maintained through a treatment strategy that uses a variety of techniques plus careful attention to monitoring. A retail aerosol applied to a baseboard by somebody with a cart to finish is not that strategy.

The active harm is dispersal. Bed bugs disturbed in a room move, and in a hotel the places they move to are the wall void, the shared plumbing chase and the room next door. A problem that was confined to one room becomes three rooms on two floors, and every one of them is out of service until it has been dealt with. Waiting it out does not work either: bed bugs can survive many months without feeding, occasionally close to a year, so a room locked and left empty is a room with a patient infestation in it.

A Guest Just Reported Bed Bugs. What Happens Now?

Move the guest, take the room out of service, and get an identification before anybody treats anything. In that order. The first hour is mostly about not making the next week worse.

1. Believe the report and move the guest, ideally not to the room next door, above or below.
2. Block the room in the system so it cannot be sold by someone who has not heard yet.
3. Bag the linens inside the room. Do not let a housekeeper carry an armful of sheets down the corridor to the laundry, which is the single easiest way to spread it.
4. Write it down while it is fresh: room number, date, what the guest described, what staff found, who looked.
5. Get a professional identification. Dark specks on a sheet can be several things, and the treatment decision should not rest on a phone photograph.
6. Have the rooms on both sides, above and below inspected at the same visit, whether or not anyone has complained about them.
7. Schedule the follow up inspection before the first one is finished.

Heat is the method most hotels want for the treatment itself, for a reason that is operational as much as entomological. Research summarized by University of Minnesota Extension puts whole room heat treatment in the range of 118 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit held for about 90 minutes to kill every life stage, eggs included, and bed bugs die once their own body temperature reaches about 113 degrees. Because heat is a physical treatment it leaves no chemical residue behind, so the room comes back into service quickly and there is nothing for the next guest to smell or ask about. Our ThermaLock heat treatment works that way, and it reaches the egg stage that sprays miss.

What Should The Paperwork Look Like?

Boring, consistent, and kept where somebody other than its author can find it. Documentation is the part of a hospitality program that gets built last and matters first, because it is what turns a series of incidents into something you can see a pattern in.

• A log entry per inspection: date, room, who inspected, full check or seam check, what was found, what was done.
• Reports kept by room number, so you can see that 212 has come up twice in four months and ask what is different about it.
• A record of staff training, with dates, covering what the four signs look like and who to tell.
• Monitor placement and the date each one was last read.
• Follow up inspection dates after any treatment, with the result written next to them.

Documentation and reporting are a standing part of the commercial pest management work we do for hotels, restaurants and multi family properties, because in a facility the record is half the service. The other half is that somebody outside your staff is looking at the same rooms on a schedule, which is how patterns get noticed by someone who is not also trying to turn a floor of rooms before check in.

Getting Started On One

If your property has a response plan but no inspection habit, start with the bed seam check on every strip and a written log. If it has neither, start with an inspection of the rooms that turn over fastest and build the routine from what it finds. We have worked Northeast Ohio since 1933 and serve hotels across Stark, Summit, Portage, Wayne and Tuscarawas counties from North Canton and Hartville. Bed bug inspections are free: ask for one through our request form or call 330-494-6199.