Did you know that even after leaving your home free of pests, you are still at risk facing a bedbug infestation during your travel? Whether it’s by flying or taking a road trip, these pests may appear anywhere.
It is very unpredictable and unavoidable since you’re not traveling alone or living in your hotel but a communal establishment. Pestwiki offers various solutions to a bedbug menace and any other pest infestation.
Spending a single night in an infested hotel is enough threat of carrying these pests with you and infesting your home. On arrival, you may not realize, but with time it’s when it dawns on you that bed bugs have infested your home.
You may experience bites during bedtime, brownish spots on your beddings and you may see them roaming about your upholsteries, beds, and walls.
What precautions do you require to prevent such a situation?
Spot check
Immediately you arrive in your hotel room to do a thorough check-in your bed, beddings, wardrobes and every item in the room to ensure there are no traces of bed bugs. Remove your clothes, take a shower and put on clean clothes.
Inspect the dirty clothes to ensure you didn’t carry bugs with you during flight. Do a thorough check up on the interior of your suitcase and also the clothes which are inside if it was not closed tightly.
Put the dirty clothes in a sealed plastic bag and any other clothes you may use during your stay there. Bed bugs feed on human blood so the bed, the sofas are such places where they hide during the daytime and crawl out at night to look for food and disrupt your peaceful bedtime.
Check the bedding to see if they are stained and the mattresses too. Notice any unusual odor on the beddings as the bedbugs have a unique smell distinct from other insects. Where infestation is massive, they are visibly seen on the walls, behind hangings where they hide from view of human beings.
Storage of clothes
Inspect the wardrobes too and if it’s safe then hang your clothes making sure any time you want to wear an outfit shake it and inspect first to free any bug that may be hiding from your view. Ironing will kill any bug that is present, but it might stain your clothes. So be careful.
At no time should you leave your bag under or on top of your bed? The bugs may be waiting for you to do so and then crawl into your luggage.
Is there a luggage rack? If so, check to confirm if it’s infested and move it away from the wall and not close to the bed. Metal structured luggage racks are the bests since the rods cannot harbor bedbugs. Place suitcase on it still in its closed tight position.
If your suitcase tightly closes and no chances of leaving any gap, I think it would be better to leave your clothes inside rather than hanging and removing and ironing only the clothes you intend to wear at a particular time. You’d rather spend some time ironing than risking your clothes being infested with bedbugs.
You may also opt to carry with you clothes that wouldn’t crease even if they remain packed in the suitcase.
Before removing your clothes from the suitcase, inspect the interior to ensure there are no bugs that may exploit any chance and get into your clothes.
Checking out
Before you check out of your hotel room, inspect your suitcase exterior and any other clothing which you have used to ensure you do not pack bed bugs together. Chances of carrying them as you leave cannot be ruled out due to their hitch hike behavior and surviving for too long without food.
It can hide in the seams and collar of your coat and comfortably live inside until it gets a suitable habitat. Remember you can still catch bugs on your flight back home. Immediately you arrive home leave everything outside and inspect to ensure your luggage is bug-free.
Have all your clothes used and unused laundered and dried to kill any pest which might have escaped your eyes? Your shoes should be thoroughly dusted to ensure no bug is hiding inside and left in the hot sun to kill any which may be hiding from your view.
Room booking
Investigate by going through customers’ reviews and comments and establish which hotel is suitable and which is not.
Find out the measures they have put in place to ensure that no visitor will check-in and leave disappointed due to bed bugs infestation. Where the hotel is unwilling to disclose its status, just avoid it and look for another option.
Conclusion
You may be having friends and relatives who’re living in the area of your visit. Through the search for the best hotel, free from bugs. If the area is prone to bedbug infestation, you may request them to host you for the short period you’ll be there.
It may be not very pleasant to request such hosting, and you’re not guaranteed comfort needed. Bed bugs have no class. They spare nobody and you may be a future victim. They don’t hop from one person to another but quietly crawl without your knowledge.
What is important is to take precautions avoiding the infested areas as much as possible. Where you book a room and realize it’s infested with bugs, just let the management know and seek an alternative. Keeping quiet and moving out is not a solution; you may be having a friend or a relative who checks in at the hotel when he is on a visit.
The management may not be aware of the infestation, and with that kind of information, they move forward to eradicate the pest for a better tomorrow.