How to Search Your Hotel Room for Bed Bugs

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YOU’RE PACKED FOR your trip, your boarding passes are downloaded… and then that little moment of terror hits. What if the hotel you’re going to stay in has bed bugs? It’s a real concern, but by being vigilant, you can reduce your chances of bringing home some unexpected souvenirs.

I don’t put a lot of trust in online hotel bed bug ratings or reports; infestation status can change from day to day, and there is no reliable way to verify that reviews are not fake.

Here’s how I search for bed bugs when I arrive at a new hotel. I can’t promise this is foolproof, but knowing how one slightly-paranoid entomologist deals with the threat of bed bugs might be useful to some readers.

Tools you will need: A flashlight, or the flashlight feature of your phone. Use your phone to take photos of anything suspicious.

What you are looking for: Bedbugs hang out near their food source–you. After feeding, bed bugs poop, creating tell-tale brown stains of your clotted blood. You typically won’t see bugs — they are fairly tiny and can scurry quickly — but you will see these stains.  You can find many itch-inducing photos here to help you know what to look for.

1. Put your luggage in the bathtub when you arrive. Luggage is a major way that bed bugs are moved from place to place. The bathroom has the fewest places for bed bugs to hide, and is the most vigorously cleaned part of a hotel room. If you actually find something suspicious in your search, you can grab your bags out of the tub and run away without risking contamination.

2. Tear the place up. Pull the bed away from the wall, if possible. Headboards fastened to the wall next to the bed are a great place for a flat little insect to stay. Shine your flashlight behind headboards and under beds. Strip the bed, right down to the mattress and bed springs to see what’s underneath the sheets and mattress pad. Lift the mattress and box springs up and look underneath.  If it’s a platform bed, inspect carefully under the springs and around the base. Pay special attention to the seams of mattresses and the box springs. These are spots the bugs like to hide in.

3. Check your sheets the next morning. When you get up the next morning, look for little blood stains or tiny rusty spots on your sheets. Reactions to bed bug bites vary widely, from no reaction at all to lots of swelling and redness.  You may be one of the people that doesn’t react with itching to the bed bug bites, so the presence of bites isn’t always a reliable check. Bed bugs sometimes bite in groups of three – but so do fleas, so that isn’t always definitive. Don’t use luggage racks, closet shelves, or drawers during your stay unless you feel confident that they are bed bug free.

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