Where Should Hotels Check for Bedbugs Between Guest Stays?

The reason hotels do not check for bedbugs is not indifference. It is that the checks they have been given take too long, so they get done on the first three rooms of a shift and abandoned.

This one takes about ninety seconds and it is built round where bedbugs actually are rather than where it would be tidy to look.

The Four Places, In Order

1. The mattress seam at the head end

Not the whole mattress. The top third, along the piped seam on both sides, and into the label pocket. This is where the first evidence appears in the overwhelming majority of rooms, because it is dark, tight and inches from where the guest's head was.

Looking for: small dark ink-like spots on the piping, pale shed skins, and live insects.

2. Under the mattress at the head end

Lift the corner and look at the top surface of the divan base and the underside of the mattress. Ten seconds, and it catches what the seam check misses.

3. The headboard

Particularly a buttoned or padded one, and particularly if it is fixed to the wall. Run a hand behind it and look down the gap. In rooms where the headboard is removable, lift it off once a month rather than every turnaround.

4. Interceptors, if fitted

A glance. That is the entire check, and it is the reason they are worth fitting.

What Housekeeping Is Looking For

• Dark spotting — small ink-like marks that do not brush off. The commonest first sign by a long way
• Shed skins — pale, translucent, bedbug-shaped and empty. Proof of breeding rather than a single hitchhiker
• Live insects — flat, oval, reddish-brown, apple-pip sized
• Tiny pale eggs — about a millimetre, glued into the seam. Hard to see and worth knowing exist

What to Do on a Find

1. Stop. Do not strip the bed, do not vacuum, do not carry on cleaning.
2. Do not move the trolley or the vacuum into the next room. This is the instruction that prevents one room becoming five.
3. Photograph it where it is.
4. Close the room and tell the duty manager.
5. Log which rooms that trolley and that vacuum had already been in that shift. Those are the ones to check next.

Making It Stick

A check like this survives contact with a real shift only if three things are true: it is short, the team knows what they are looking at, and finding something is not treated as a failure.

The third matters most. An attendant who thinks a bedbug find will be blamed on their cleaning will not report the first one, and the first one is the only cheap one.

How Often, Realistically

• Every turnaround — the seam and the interceptor glance, ninety seconds
• Monthly — headboard off the wall, divan corners opened, in rooms with a history
• After any report — the reported room, both neighbours, above and below
• After a deep clean or refurbishment — furniture moved between rooms is a classic transfer route

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