Hotel Bedbug Treatment Lewisham

A Let Room With Residents Around It

Larger hotels are built as hotels: every room is let, the corridors are the operator’s, and a problem can be contained floor by floor. A small guest house, or a room in a flat that is let online, is usually none of those things. It may be one room out of a family home, a self-contained flat in a house divided four ways, or a handful of rooms with the owner living on the top floor.

That changes three things. You cannot take the building out of use; you often do not control the flats around the let room; and the people most likely to pick up bedbugs from it are not guests who leave on Friday but households who stay. Everything below is written with that in mind. For how we approach hotel work in general, the London hotel treatment page has the full explanation.

When There Is No Night Manager

In a small operation the person who hears about bedbugs is the owner, often by message, sometimes after the guest has gone. Nobody is on a desk to move the guest to another room, and there may not be another room to move them to. That is fine. What matters is what happens to the room next.

• Stop taking bookings for that room until it has been looked at, rather than cleaning it for the next arrival
• Ask the guest for a photograph of whatever they found, and keep the message
• Leave the bed as it is; bag the linen inside the room and wash it hot
• If you share a washing machine with your own household, keep the guest linen separate until it has been through a hot dryer

The London guide to handling a guest report covers the conversation with the guest in more depth. Our laundry guide helps if the linen has to go out to be washed.

Choosing a Treatment Around the Booking Calendar

With heat, the let room is raised to a temperature bedbugs cannot survive and held there for most of a day, and it can take bookings again once it has cooled and been put back together. It is usually one visit and it deals with eggs, which is why owners who rely on the room for income tend to lean towards it, even though it costs more. The heat treatment page for Lewisham covers what heating one unit inside a shared house involves.

Chemical costs less, and the room can be used once the treated surfaces have dried. The catch is the follow-up: two, sometimes three, visits about 10 to 14 days apart, each of which needs the room empty of guests and the bedding stripped. If you can block those dates in the calendar, it works; if the room is booked solidly, it becomes hard to keep the course on time. The chemical treatment page is about keeping a course of visits on track.

The Neighbours Who Are Not Guests

A let room in a conversion shares floors and party walls with homes. Once the room itself is treated, we usually put a light residual along the edges it shares with those homes, so that anything coming back through the floor or the wall meets it. We will also say plainly if the pattern of what we find points towards a neighbouring flat.

If you own or manage only the let room, the neighbours are not ours to contact, and not yours to treat. What you can do is tell whoever manages the building, in writing, so the other flats can be checked if needed. The Brockley page goes through how a problem moves between the floors of a conversion.

Checking the Room Between Stays

Without a housekeeping team, the check at changeover falls to whoever turns the room round. It does not need to be long. When the sheets come off, look along the mattress piping at the head end, lift a corner of the mattress, and glance at the joints of the frame and the back of the headboard. Dark spotting there is worth a phone call before the next guest arrives.

Luggage racks and a hard surface for suitcases help too, because a bag on the bed is how bedbugs get into and out of a guest room. The London guide on where hotels should check sets out the places in order.

What It Costs a Small Operator

Hotel and guest house work is quoted on the rooms involved. Treatments start from £220, with heat costing more than chemical, and inspections start from £120 if you want neighbouring rooms looked at before deciding. You get the figure on the phone before anything is booked. If you let rooms across several flats in one building, the commercial page for Lewisham may fit you better.

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