How to Find and Avoid Bed Bugs in Hotel and Motel Rooms

Bed bugs in hotel rooms are easy to rule out in five minutes. Before you unpack anything, put your luggage in the bathtub. Then spend five minutes checking the mattress seams, the box spring edge, the headboard, and the luggage rack straps for dark fecal spotting or insects the size of an apple seed. Price is not protection; upscale hotels get them too. The routine when you get home matters as much as the one at check-in.

Bed bugs should not keep you from traveling, as long as you give every new room a five-minute check before you open your bag.

The five minutes are worth it because the costs are so uneven. If you find bed bugs and change rooms, they cost you nothing. If you carry them home in a suitcase, they can cost you months and a major treatment bill.

No. Bed bugs are spread by travelers, not by dirt. The number of guests passing through a room matters more than its price or how clean it is. Well-documented cases involve upscale properties, and no region of the United States is reliably free of them. Judging a room by its price is a common mistake.

The useful mental model: a hotel room is a place where hundreds of suitcases from hundreds of homes have sat. Some of those homes had bed bugs. Housekeeping standards affect many things; they do not much affect bed bugs in hotel rooms.

Do it before anything comes out of your bag, and in this order.

First, park the luggage in the bathtub. Not on the bed, not on the floor, and not on the luggage rack. A dry tub is a smooth-sided surface bed bugs are unlikely to climb into, and it costs nothing to use it for five minutes.

Then check, in this order:

1. Mattress seams and the tag area. Pull the fitted sheet back at two corners. You are looking for small dark spots like ink bled into fabric, translucent shed skins, or an insect the size and shape of an apple seed. 2. Box spring edge and underside. Lift the mattress corner. The box spring's fabric edge is a more common hiding spot than the mattress itself. 3. Headboard. The most overlooked spot in the room, and often the first place they establish. Many headboards lift off wall brackets; check the back and any bolt holes. 4. The luggage rack straps. The woven straps and their stitching are a real hiding spot. The rack sitting off the floor and away from the bed does not make it safe, which is exactly why this one gets skipped. 5. The nightstand, especially the seam where the top meets the frame, and the drawer runners.

If you find anything, report it to the hotel, but do not accept a room next to yours. Ask for a room on a different floor, since the rooms beside and directly above yours are the most likely to share the problem.

On a hard surface, off the floor, and away from the bed. The tub works during the inspection. For the stay itself, a luggage rack that you have already checked, a desk, or a dresser top is fine. If you are unsure what you are looking at, photograph it and call us at (303) 346-7087 when you are home. What is not fine is the bed, the upholstered chair, or the carpet.

Keep the suitcase closed when you are not in it. An open bag is an invitation; a closed hard-sided bag is a poor target.

A useful habit for anyone who travels often: keep worn clothing in a sealed bag inside the suitcase rather than loose. It makes the routine at home much simpler.

This is where a bed bug that rode home in your luggage is either stopped or carried into the rest of your home.

• Do not bring the suitcase into the bedroom. Unpack in the garage, the laundry room, or the entryway
• Put everything washable straight into the dryer on high heat for a full cycle, whether or not it was worn. Heat is what gets rid of them, and the dryer does more than the wash
• Inspect the suitcase's seams, zippers, and pockets before it goes back into storage, and vacuum it out
• Store luggage somewhere other than the bedroom closet when practical

Doing the dryer cycle on arrival is the single highest-value habit in this article. It costs one load of laundry and it closes the route almost entirely.

If something does turn up at home in the following weeks, the identification and treatment side is covered in our article on bed bugs in the home. You can call Guardian Pest Management at (303) 346-7087 to have it identified before you spend anything.

Guardian Pest Management is family owned. Sean and Michelle Meade have run it since 2000. We serve Highlands Ranch, Littleton, Castle Rock, Parker, Centennial, Lone Tree, Castle Pines, Greenwood Village, Roxborough, and Cherry Hills. Sean and Michelle personally bring more than 30 years of pest control industry experience, earned before Guardian was founded. That was earned before Guardian opened. We hold a 5.0-star Google rating in South Metro Denver.

If you find something after a trip and cannot identify it, call us before you book any treatment. It often turns out to be a carpet beetle or a spider beetle rather than a bed bug, and we will tell you that.

Worried about bed bugs in hotel rooms on an upcoming trip? Call Guardian Pest Management at (303) 346-7087, or start at myguardianpest.com.

Related reading: Finding and treating bed bugs at home; When a pest problem is worth calling about; Where DIY pest control goes wrong.