from Popular Science Monthly, v. 37, 1890

A friend of mine just emailed me for suggestions about Pricelining a hotel room in New York City, something I do pretty often. I shared my strategies with her, and then offered her unsolicited advice about checking for bed bugs. As you no doubt know, bed bugs are a big problem in a great many cities (not just New York). They’re appearing not only in hotel rooms, but also in department stores and movie theaters, and they are extremely resistant to the most common class of insecticides.

I have met quite a few entomologists, but even the most die-hard of us bug lovers draw the line at sharing our beds with Cimex lectularius. Although bed bugs don’t transmit disease, they can inflict pretty awful psychic trauma.

So, here are some simple strategies that can help you avoid contact with these loathsome little arthropods. Mind you, this advice is for the traveller. If you live in a home with an infestation, you have a whole different set of issues that are beyond the scope of today’s blog. (My good friend, E., who lives in Brooklyn, had a bad infestation in her building where the bugs were resistant to repeated sprayings. She eventually had to move.)

First, don’t be too concerned about movie theaters and taxicabs. Bedbugs don’t travel on people the way, say, lice might. But they can migrate into your luggage.

The first thing I do when I know where I’m staying is to look up my hotel on bedbugregistry.com. If you find that an incident was reported, don’t panic. It may well have been dealt with, but calling the hotel to inquire won’t help. I mean, think about it. It’s a public relations disaster for a hotel to acknowledge that it has bedbugs, so of course they’re going to tell you the problem has been resolved.

photo by Michael Gray via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s what I do, whether the hotel has been reported or not. When I arrive at my room, I put my suitcase in the bathroom. Then I do a thorough check for bugs, underneath the mattress cover, in the seams of the mattress ticking (look for poppy-seed-sized black flecks, which is their poop), and along the baseboards and behind the bed. I bring a small flashlight, magnifying glass, and a Ziploc baggie. (It’s important to be able to produce anything you might find for the people at the hotel so you can change rooms if necessary—that’s why the baggie.)

I admit that even if I don’t find any evidence of bugs, if the hotel was listed on bedbugregistry.com, I leave my stuff in the bathroom. If you’re truly paranoid, you can use a lint roller on your luggage before you bring it back into the house–and then throw it all into the dryer at the hottest setting.