Unpacking After a Holiday Without Bringing Bedbugs Home: Bexley

Bedbugs do not live on people. They hide in the things people carry, and a suitcase that sat on a hotel bed or next to a headboard for a week is the most common way they reach a house. The aim when you get home is simple: keep the case away from the bedrooms until you have dealt with what is inside it.

Before You Even Open the Case

Decide where unpacking happens before you walk in. A hallway with a hard floor, a kitchen, a utility room or a garage are all better than a bedroom. What you want is a hard, pale surface where a small dark insect would show up, well away from beds, sofas and carpet edges.

If you had any reason to be suspicious on the trip, such as bites that were not there before or spotting on the hotel sheets, leave the case closed in that spot and deal with the clothes first.

What to Do With the Clothes

1. Take the clothes straight from the case into a bin bag or the washing machine, without shaking them out in the room.
2. Wash everything that can take it on the hottest setting the label allows, worn or not.
3. Put anything that cannot be washed through a hot tumble dryer cycle instead, if the fabric allows it.
4. Keep delicate items bagged and sealed until they can be cleaned, rather than hanging them in a wardrobe.
5. Only put clothes away once they have been through the wash or the dryer.

It is the heat that does the job, not the detergent. A cool eco wash cleans the clothes but may not kill what is in them, so for the first load home it is worth the hotter setting.

The Suitcase Itself

Once it is empty, look inside the case in good light. Check the seams of the lining, the pockets, the zip channels and the track the handle slides into. Bedbugs and their pale eggs sit in tight folds rather than out in the open.

Run a vacuum with a nozzle along the seams and pockets, then empty the vacuum outside straight away. A hard-shell case can be wiped down. Then store it somewhere that is not a bedroom: a garage, shed or loft is better than the top of the wardrobe or the space under the bed.

Washbags, Shoes and Everything Else

Toiletry bags, rucksacks, handbags and shoes travel in the same case and get put down in the same hotel rooms. Empty them on the same hard surface, look in the seams and pockets, and wash or vacuum what you can. Books, chargers and gifts can be wiped down and checked before they go upstairs.

Children’s bags are easy to forget. A soft toy that slept in a hotel bed every night of the holiday should go through a hot wash or the dryer before it goes back to bed with its owner.

Checking a Hotel Room While You Are Away

The easiest suitcase to deal with is one that never picked anything up. On arrival anywhere, put the luggage on a rack or a hard floor rather than the bed, and pull back the corner of the sheet to look at the mattress seams and the back of the headboard. Dark spotting there is a reason to ask for another room. Our London hotel page covers what hotels themselves check.

If You Find Something at Home

Stop unpacking, close the case, and put whatever you caught in a jar or on sticky tape. Keep sleeping in your own bed as normal rather than moving to the sofa, which only gives them a second place to settle. If you are not sure what you found, an inspection from £120 tells you before anything is spent on treatment.

If it turns out they did get into a bedroom, that is a treatable problem, and the sooner it is caught the smaller the job. Our guide to how fast they spread through a house explains why a week makes a difference, and the Bexley page covers the treatment routes for a family home.

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