Bed bugs are still a major problem for hotels. Here are seven tips for avoiding bed bugs.
Do you remember the film, “Coming to America”? In it, King Jaffe Joffer (James Earl Jones) comes to New York City to bring his son back home. What hotel has King Joffer’s reservation? The Waldorf Astoria, of course. After all, the Waldorf is the choice of celebrities and heads of state, as well as kings and queens.
Apparently, the Waldorf is also the “home on the road” of bed bugs. A Florida woman says the bed bug bites she suffered in her Waldorf bed left her with welts and rashes so severe she had to take the anti-inflammatory Prednisone for a week.
Don’t think the Waldorf is the only hotel with such a problem.
During the last decade, the Bed Bug Registry has collected reports of hundreds of thousands of bed bug infestations in the US and Canada, many of them hotels. Bed bug problems are regularly reported by hotel guests.
Cimex lectularius, commonly known as bed bugs, are reddish-brown, tiny, elusive, parasitic, oval-shaped insects. They are wingless and survive by sucking blood from a host animal. In hotels, that generally means a human hotel guest. They can be a hotel’s “vampire” nightmare.
The name “bed bug” comes from their preference for infesting beds. They are mostly active at night and quite capable of feeding unnoticed on their host humans. Unnoticed, that is, until their human host awakens with red, itchy, very ugly welts on their body. (I’m getting itchy just writing this column.)
According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), “Although bed bugs are not known to transmit disease, they are a pest of significant public health importance.”
The CDC further states,
“Bed bugs cause a variety of negative physical health, mental health and economic consequences. Many people have mild to severe allergic reaction to the bites, with effects ranging from no reaction to a small bite mark to, in rare cases, anaphylaxis (severe, whole-body reaction). These bites can also lead to secondary infections of the skin such as impetigo, ecthyma, and lymphanigitis”
Bed bugs were virtually eradicated with pesticides like DDT, but with real concerns about health and the environment, most broad-spectrum pesticides have given way to more specific pesticides, designed to kill individual species. Apparently, as a result, bed bugs have slipped through the cracks without a specific pesticide meant to exterminate them.
Avoiding bed bugs is not easy. Bed bugs hide in beds, upholstered furniture and behind baseboards in hotels across the globe. What’s worse, they can stow away and travel with humans, so you can take them home. That happens all too often, and it can affect unwitting wealthy people and business travelers as much as anyone else.
Michael Newberg, after returning from Estes Park, Colorado, brought home bed bugs from his hotel. Not only did he have to fumigate his house three times, to the tune of about $4,000, he even had to throw away his 8-year-old daughter’s stuffed animals.
So, what can you do to avoid bed bugs, these “creatures of the night,” while traveling? Here are seven tips which I follow.
1. Look for reviews of hotels you’re considering. Most likely, if the hotel has had a bed bug problem, someone’s going to mention it in the reviews.
2. Check the Bed Bug Registry to see if your hotel’s been reported.
3. If you have any bed bug concerns at all before you use your hotel room, leave your luggage at the door and take a little time to inspect your room.
Pull back the sheets and look at the mattress and the box spring. Look at the seams of your room’s upholstered furniture. Check each drawer in your room. Check any cracks or peeling paint on the walls of your room and look behind picture frames, if you can. Look for the bugs or their droppings, which can be smaller than a poppy seed, their eggs, which are white with a red spot, and their shed skins.
4. If your room is likely infested, ask the hotel clerk to move you to a room with no history of bed bugs (they don’t seem to travel from room to room), but make sure you check the new room anyway before moving into it.
5. Keep your luggage on racks, not on the floor or under the bed.
6. Consider using solid luggage, not cloth.
7. Don’t unpack your clothes into your hotel room’s drawers.
Just in case I might have brought the pests home in my clothing, I pack all soiled clothing in a sealed plastic bag in my luggage and put it in the washer immediately upon returning home. I throw the bag out in the trash once empty.
If you are bitten by bed bugs, make sure you attend to the bites immediately. Hopefully, your travels will be vampire bug-free.
After many years working in corporate America as a chemical engineer, executive and eventually CFO of a multinational manufacturer, Ned founded a tech consulting company and later restarted NSL Photography, his photography business. Before entering the corporate world, Ned worked as a Public Health Engineer for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. As a well known corporate, travel and wildlife photographer, Ned travels the world writing about travel and photography, as well as running photography workshops, seminars and photowalks. Visit Ned’s Photography Blog and Galleries.
