I want to talk to you a little bit today about traveling and tips on looking for bedbugs.
When they enter their hotel room, the first thing most people do is throw their stuff
on the bed, the luggage rack or maybe even both. When you’re traveling in this day
and age, that’s a no-no, because bedbugs could be in either of those places.
The best thing to do when you enter a room is to bring what you’re carrying into the
bathtub. After you’ve put your luggage in the bathtub, it’s time to start checking
your room. The first place to check is behind the bed backboards, in the corners, along
the creases of it, any place you can see on the bed backboard.
The next place you look is along the piping of the mattress,
looking for either the adult bedbugs, immature bedbugs or anything that looks suspicious
to you. You want to do that all the way around the entire bed, along the top part and the
bottom part. The next place you look is more disgusting.
You need to be looking either directly on the mattress or on a mattress pad. You take
the sheet off, and what you’re looking for here is actually blood spots where the bedbugs
have been feeding. The next place you should look is the bureau
beside you. You want to look all along the inside of bureau, tip it over and look along
these corners. Bedbugs are very secretive. In most cases, they’re within 20 feet of
their host, so in a hotel room like this, you know there’s not a lot of space for
them to be. Chances are they’re going to be right on the bed or in the night tables
beside the bed. The other place that we talked about earlier
as I came into the room is the luggage rack. A luggage rack is a very good place for bedbugs
to hide. Because this webbing is so nice and snug, the bedbugs really like to get in underneath
here. So when I’m in a room, I fold it up and look underneath there. You look there
and right around where it attaches. By folding it, you have plenty of give to the fabric.
Most people don’t even bother to do that. They don’t move it, they just leave it and
put their luggage down. As I say, it’s a prime place for bedbugs to hide.
And again, in most places, it’s probably within 5 feet of the bed, so if the bedbugs
aren’t actually on the bed, they can just zip across in the night and onto the bed.
They’re easy to transport, so that’s why you start out putting everything where you
shouldn’t find bedbugs. Chances are there aren’t going to be bedbugs in the bathroom.
It could occur, but once you put your stuff in the bathtub, it’s pretty safe.
All right, so you’ve gone into your room, you’ve checked your room and you’re happy
you haven’t found any bedbugs, so you can be content and hope there are no bedbugs.
But the question that remains is what if you found a bedbug? The first thing you can do
if you found a bedbug is pick up your luggage, get out of the room, go to the head of the
hotel and just say, ‘Please give me another room.’ Of course, you could always check
out of that hotel. Bedbugs are kind of strange in that they could
be in your room and that might be the only room in the hotel they’re in. Normally,
if I find them, I usually stay in that hotel but move into another room. Usually, I try
to get as far away from that room as I can. But bedbugs are very spotty: They can be in
a five-star hotel or a dingy hostel you may be staying in.
And they’re easily transported. That’s why the whole thing about the luggage. Bedbugs
have a tendency to crawl into anything that’s around to hide, and that’s why they’re
transported to your house, to another hotel, to movie theaters, to train stations, you
name it. That’s where they are, and they’re a serious problem.