Hotel Bedbug Treatment Barking and Dagenham

The Smaller End of Guest Accommodation

This page is for the smaller places to stay: a guest house with a handful of rooms, a flat or spare room let by the night through a booking site, or a few rooms above another business near one of the borough’s stations. What they share is that nobody is on a front desk at two in the morning and no housekeeping supervisor is walking the corridors.

A staffed hotel has a routine for a bedbug report. For the full explanation of how we treat hotel rooms, including the steps a staffed hotel takes in the first hour, see our London hotel treatment page. Here we deal with the version where the person who reads the message is also the person who changes the beds.

When the Report Arrives and You Are Not There

In a small place, reports tend to come by text or through the booking platform rather than at a desk. The guest may still be in the room, may have left in the night, or may be writing from home a day later. Whichever it is, your first reply sets the tone, and the first things you ask them to do decide how far it goes.

• Ask for a photograph of what they found and where: the seam, the headboard, the sheet. A clear picture tells us a lot before anyone travels.
• Ask them to keep their luggage zipped and off the bed. If you offer another room, the bags go with them closed and sit on a hard floor, not on the new bed.
• If they have caught one, ask them to keep it on clear tape or in a small pot. A specimen settles the question faster than any description.
• Stay polite and stick to facts. Thank them and tell them what you are doing. Arguing about whether they brought it with them rarely gets anywhere and changes nothing about what the room needs.

If the guest is worried about bites, a pharmacist is the usual first stop, and anyone with signs of a severe allergic reaction should call 999.

The Room, Before Anyone Cleans It

Without a housekeeping team, rooms are turned round by the owner or by a cleaner who comes in between bookings. That turnaround is when one room becomes two. Tell whoever cleans, before their next visit, that this room is closed.

1. Take the room off sale on every site it is listed on, not only the one the guest booked through.
2. Leave the bed as it is. A bed stripped before we arrive loses the marks that show how long this has been going on.
3. If linen must come off, bag it inside the room and take the sealed bag straight to a hot wash, without resting it on another bed.
4. Keep the vacuum out. Using it in this room and then the next is an easy way to carry bedbugs along a landing.
5. Write down the rooms either side, above and below. They need a look before their next arrival.

Heat or Chemical When Every Room Counts

When you only have four or five rooms, a room out of use for weeks is a real loss. That usually decides the route.

Heat treatment is normally one visit. The room is raised to a temperature bedbugs cannot survive, checked with a thermal camera, and can be made up for the next guest once it has cooled. It costs more. If the room shares a wall or floor with another let room, we may add a light residual at the edges before we leave.

Chemical treatment costs less but runs as a course: usually two visits, sometimes three, about ten to fourteen days apart. The room can be used once dry, but it stays an open job until the last visit. For a room you want to keep letting, that is hard to square with paying guests; for a room that can sit empty for a few weeks, it can be the sensible choice. We talk that through with you before anything is booked.

The Rooms Next Door

A bedbug that arrived in one guest’s case can walk to the next room along the skirting or under a connecting door. In a converted house the rooms are often back to back, with pipes running between them. Those rooms need checking before their next booking. If they are clear, you keep letting them. If not, they join the job, and it is far better to learn that now than from a second guest.

An inspection starts from £120 and covers the rooms you are unsure about; the inspections page says what you get. If the rooms sit above a shop, the Barking page covers the questions that kind of building raises. If you live in the same building, include your own bedroom in the check.

Keeping a Record and Getting a Price

Keep the guest’s messages, the photographs, the dates the room was closed and reopened, and what we found. If a refund or a complaint comes up later, a dated record is what you will want to hand. We tell you in writing what we found and what we did.

Work for guest accommodation is quoted on the rooms involved and the route in each. Treatments start from £220, heat costs more than chemical, and you get the figure on the phone before anything is booked. Ring 0800 955 1018 and tell us how many rooms you let and which are affected. Homes rather than lets are covered on the borough page.

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