Bed Bugs: How to Combat Them in Your Hotel or Resort
Every hospitality professional dreads the thought of bed bugs making their way onto their property. Not only can bed bugs ruin a guest’s experience, but they are also a legitimate health concern. These persistent pests are difficult to get rid of once they’ve found their way into your guest rooms. What’s worse is that they reproduce quickly which means that once you have bed bugs, you could quickly find yourself with an infestation on your hands.
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Checking for Bed Bugs
Bed bugs can thrive anywhere that people sleep. Hotels and resorts are ideal places for these pests to settle in and wait for their next meal. The incredibly small size of this pest, and its tendency to hide in small crevasses, make it difficult to spot a bed bug infestation until someone is bitten.
Bed bugs tend to search for a meal people are asleep in bed. Victims of bed bug bites will often have large patches of red welts from being bitten multiple times. These bites can be itchy and painful. Needless to say, waking up to find you’ve been attacked by bed bugs is not a pleasant experience.
Due to their small size, bed bugs have the ability to spread through a property at an incredible rate. They can easily hitch a ride on people, luggage, or cleaning carts, which makes it easy for them to travel from one guest room to the next.
Bed bug mitigation depends on attentiveness. It is very important that your hotel’s cleaning staff is trained to perform periodic checks for any signs of bed bugs, and respond to reports of sightings quickly.
Common areas where bed bugs hide include:
- Bed Sheets
- Pillow Cases
- Mattress Tufts
- Bed Frames
- Couch Cushions
- Luggage
- Walls and Baseboards
Treating and Preventing Infestations
Bed bug infestations must be handled in a specific way. If you simply spray a guest room infested with bed bugs, then you risk scattering them to other parts of your property. Bed bugs must be targeted with very specific pesticides or steam treatments.
Hotel bed bug prevention can be tricky. No matter how diligent you are about cleaning your guest rooms, bed bugs can make their way into any hotel. There are steps you can take to help reduce the chances of an infestation. Make sure that you limit the number of places where they can hide. Cover your beds with mattress protectors, and make sure that any crevasses behind baseboards, in plumbing, and window frames are properly sealed.
Make sure that your maintenance staff is prepared with the right tools to combat bed bugs at your hotel. Source1 Purchasing can help you secure the most competitive prices on bed bug pesticides and other hotel bed bug treatments from top-rated suppliers like HD Supply. Contact us today for a free cost-savings analysis.