Can Hotels and Luggage Bring Bed Bugs Home?

What Does Not Predict It

Price

Bed bugs are carried in by guests. A property's exposure is a function of how many people pass through it and where they came from, not of what it charges. Expensive hotels have more guests who travel more.

How clean the room looks

They have no interest in dirt and gain nothing from it. A spotless room and an untidy one are equally habitable, and an immaculate room tells you about the housekeeping rather than about the seams.

Star rating or a chain name

What a rating tells you is about facilities and service standards. What matters here is whether the property has a monitoring routine and how it responds to a report — neither of which is on any rating scale.

The Five Minute Check, Wherever You Are Staying

Not paranoid and not rude. Do it before you unpack, and staff would far rather you did than did not.

1. Put the case on the rack or a hard surface first, before anything else. Not the bed, not the floor
2. Pull back the bedding and look at the mattress piping at the head end, both sides
3. Look at the top of the divan or frame under the mattress corners
4. Look behind the headboard where you can, and along the join with the wall
5. Check the bedside table — the joints and the back of the drawer
6. Glance at the skirting behind the bed

If You Find Something

• Ask for a room in a different part of the building, not next door and not directly above or below
• Do not put your case down again until you are in the new room and have checked it
• Tell them what you found and where. Specific is more useful and more credible than a complaint
• Photograph it, in place
• Deal with the case and everything in it when you get home, whatever else happens

The Habits That Do the Work

1. Case on the rack, closed, away from the bed
2. Nothing on the floor overnight — clothes, coat, bag
3. Dirty washing in a sealed bag inside the case rather than loose
4. The five-minute check on arrival
5. The twenty minutes at home: unpack somewhere hard-floored, everything washable to a hot wash and a full hot tumble dry, check the empty case
6. Store the case away from bedrooms and never under a bed

Six habits, none of them onerous, and between them they close off the commonest route into a house.

Henley: Keeping It In Proportion

Most trips carry no risk at all, because most rooms do not have bed bugs. The reason to bother is that the habits cost a minute each and the thing they prevent is a treatment and several weeks of disruption.

It is also worth saying plainly: if something does come home, it arrives as one or two insects rather than as a population. Dealt with in the twenty minutes after you get back, it very often amounts to nothing at all.