Bed Bugs in a Hotel: What to Do Tonight, and Before You Go Home

The most useful ninety seconds of any hotel stay happen before the suitcase is opened. Bed bugs are introduced to hotels by guests, which means the risk is not really about the property’s cleanliness — it is about how many people have slept in that room recently and where they came from before.

That also means the check is quick, because bed bugs stay close to where people sleep. You are not searching a room. You are searching about two square metres of it.

Where to put the luggage first

Before anything else, put the bag somewhere that is not soft and not near the bed. The bathroom is ideal — hard floor, hard surfaces, nothing upholstered, and typically the furthest point in the room from the mattress. Failing that, the hard floor by the door.

Do not put luggage on the bed. Do not put it on the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed, which exists specifically to hold luggage and is for that reason one of the higher-risk surfaces in the room. Do not use the folding rack until you have looked at its straps and joints, which are a genuine harbourage point.

This single habit does most of the work. Even in a room that turns out to have bed bugs, a case that spent the evening on a bathroom tile floor is very unlikely to have anything in it.

The 90-second check

1. The headboard and the wall behind it. Start here. Wall-mounted headboards are the most reliably infested item in a hotel room, for one simple reason: they are never removed for cleaning. If it lifts off its brackets, lift it and look at the back and at the wall. If it does not, get a phone torch into the gap at the top and along the sides.

2. The mattress. Pull the bedding back at the head end. Run the torch along the piped seam on all four sides, and check under the label. Seams and labels are where the evidence collects.

3. The box spring and frame. Lift the mattress corner and look at the top edge of the box spring, particularly where the fabric is stapled. Check the frame joints and screw holes if the bed is on a timber frame.

4. The bedside table and any upholstered chair. Drawer runners, the joint where the top meets the leg, and the seams and underside of the chair. This is the lowest-yield of the four and still worth thirty seconds.

Everything else in the room — the wardrobe, the curtains, the desk on the far wall — is a long way down the list. Bed bugs harbour close to the host. Distance from the pillow is the best single predictor of where they are not.

What you are looking for

Live insects are the thing people expect to find and the thing they are least likely to see. Bed bugs are nocturnal, they are good at hiding, and at the population level a traveller might realistically encounter, seeing one is uncommon. Look for the traces instead.

Dark staining along a seam is the highest-value sign. It is digested blood, so on fabric it wicks slightly into the fibres like ink rather than sitting on the surface like a crumb, and on hard surfaces it forms small raised dots. A run of them along a piping seam or in a screw hole is close to conclusive. The staining guide covers the distinction from dirt, mould and pen marks in detail.

Shed skins are pale amber, translucent and hollow — a bed bug shape with nothing inside it. They mean a population has been breeding there rather than passing through.

Eggs are about a millimetre, pearly white and cemented in place. You will need to look closely and they will be deep in a seam.

One caution before escalating: several insects get mistaken for bed bugs, and carpet beetle larvae in particular turn up in hotel rooms and look alarming to someone who has just been searching for bed bugs. The misidentification guide is worth a look before you make a complaint you cannot support.

If you find them at midnight

Stop unpacking, and do not move the luggage onto the bed. Whatever else happens, the case stays off soft surfaces.

Photograph it. Get the evidence and, if you can, something identifying the room in the same frame. This takes ten seconds and it is the difference between a report and an assertion.

Call the front desk and ask to be moved — not next door. This is the part most guests get wrong, and hotels sometimes get wrong too. The rooms either side, directly above and directly below the affected room are the ones most likely to be affected next, because bed bugs travel through shared wall voids, along wiring and plumbing chases, and under doors. Ask for a different floor or a different wing.

Keep your luggage with you and keep it closed. Do not let it be moved separately or stored. If the property offers to launder or heat-treat your clothing, that is a good sign and worth accepting.

Do not spray anything. This applies in a hotel as much as at home. Retail bed bug products are almost all pyrethroid-based, resistance is widespread, and the repellent effect survives intact — so the main achievement is scattering the population into the adjoining rooms.

Most properties will move you and comp the night without argument. If you were bitten, ask for the incident to be recorded in writing and keep your own dated photographs. A hotel with dated inspection records and a response procedure is in a very different position from one with neither, which is exactly why the good ones document.

The luggage protocol, before you go home

This is the part that matters most, and it happens after the trip rather than during it. A hotel infestation that stays in the hotel costs you a bad night. One that comes home costs $1,000 to $2,500.

Do not take the suitcase into the bedroom. Not for an hour, not to unpack it “just quickly”. The bedroom is where you least want to introduce anything, and unpacking on the bed is the single most common way a travel exposure becomes a household infestation.

Unpack somewhere hard-floored. A garage, a porch, a laundry room, or — if you live in an apartment with none of those — the bathtub, which is smooth-sided, easy to inspect and easy to clean.

Hot wash and hot dry everything washable. Thirty minutes in a dryer on high kills every life stage, eggs included. The dryer is doing the work here rather than the wash, so items that cannot be washed but can tolerate heat go through the dryer alone.

Inspect the case before storing it. Seams, zip tracks, the wheel housings and any external pocket. Then store it away from the bedroom — a garage or hall cupboard rather than under the bed, which is the worst available storage location for a suitcase.

You do not need to do this after every trip. It is worth doing after any stay where you saw something you were not sure about, and it is worth doing as routine if you travel constantly.

Which properties actually carry more risk

Room rate is a much weaker predictor than travellers assume. Bed bugs arrive with guests, so what drives risk is turnover, the geographic spread of the guest base, and how fast a property finds and handles a report. Cleanliness helps at the margin — a housekeeping team that strips beds attentively finds things earlier — but a spotless room is not a cleared room.

In Washington, the concentration follows the traffic. The I-5 corridor from Vancouver through Kelso, Centralia, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle and Everett to Bellingham carries the highest turnover in the state. I-90 east through Ellensburg, Moses Lake and into Spokane runs the same pattern at lower volume. Properties near Sea-Tac take luggage that was in an aircraft hold hours earlier, and seasonal lodging in Leavenworth, Chelan, Ocean Shores and Long Beach compresses a year of turnover into a few months.

None of that makes any given room a problem. It means that across a year and a property, the question is when rather than whether — which is why the properties worth staying in are the ones running scheduled inspections rather than waiting for a guest to be the detection method. The hotel treatment page covers what that looks like from the operator’s side.

If something did come home with you, call us and we will get someone out. Bed bug removal covers what happens next, and acting in the first fortnight is materially cheaper than acting in the second month.