Pest Videos

Transcript

Hi, I'm Missy Henriksen with the National Pest Management Association, and I'm here with today's Pest 411 on how to properly inspect your hotel room for bed bugs. So, before we do our inspection, we're going to put our suitcase over here in the tile floor and then we'll move over and we'll inspect the bed. 

Step One: Check the Mattress
To begin your inspection, you're going to want to start in the bed area and you're going to gently pull back your sheeting and you're going to inspect the mattress cover. Make sure you don't see any telltale signs of any blood stains that might be on there or certainly you don't see any signs of small lentil sized brown bugs. That would be evidence certainly of a bed bug infestation. You're going to want to check around the mattress seams, and certainly if there are bed skirts on the bedding, you're going to want to look in that area as well. 

Step Two: Inspect the Headboard 
Once you've completed your inspection of the bed, you're going to want to move up to the headboard area. Hopefully you're traveling for safety with a small flashlight. You can also use that flashlight to look around and again see if you see any kinds of small bugs that might be lurking in the area. So the beds looking good in the area right around the bed. So next we're going to move over and inspect the soft good areas of the room. We're going to go take a look at the chair. 

Step Three: Examine the Furniture 
So, it's a misnomer that bed bugs are just found in the beds. They actually can travel and be in lots of different areas within a room. So you are also going to want to inspect any kind of soft goods that might be in your hotel room as well. Definitely a chair or a couch. 

Step Four: Unpack Strategically
Now that we've done our inspection of our room and we feel confident that we haven't seen any signs of bed bugs, it's now safe to unpack our clothes. Always make sure you keep your suitcase off of the floor. So we put it up here on the luggage rack. It's now safe to take our clothes out, put them in the drawers, and put them in the closet. Certainly hanging your clothes is a good way to make sure they're not coming into contact with anything that might be hiding some kind of a bed bug.