When searching results for “how to check hotel room for bed bugs” from Google you get 12 400 000 results. It doesn’t take too many minutes to notice that all of them follow the same dramaturgy. By following these easy steps you guarantee a nice stay in a hotel: 

1. Check if your destination has hotels safe from bed bugs from the Valpas hotels page. Just book with a hotel that's a member of the Valpas protocol and travel there - and back home! - with a peace of mind. If you can't find a member at your destination, move to our tip #2.

2. When you first enter a new hotel room, keep your luggage off the floor until you have inspected the room.

3. Get yourself a flashlight - bed bugs are hard to spot, especially when hiding under furniture or in dark corners of your hotel room.

4. Start with the bed, where bed bugs usually nest. Look for dark spots of insect waste and blood stains that indicate bedbugs’ messy eating. 

5. If you can’t find anything, keep on looking. Remove the bed sheets and check the mattress and box-spring seams for bugs, especially the head of the bed. Lift the mattress and check underneath.

6. After carefully going through the bed, inspect furniture around the bed paying attention to cracks, crevasses, seams, joints and screw holes.

Crawling under the bed with a flashlight searching for bed bugs isn’t exactly the best start for a hotel stay. Why do so many people bother with these manual checkups today? And why is media writing about it? The answer is simple: people stress and are afraid of bed bugs more than ever before because they are everywhere. And people are aware of that. According to American Entomologist 34 % of hotel guests do manual checkups when arriving to a hotel. 

Hitchhiking bed bugs taking over the hotel rooms surreptitiously is a common nightmare of hoteliers. The question is, what can hotels do about this growing problem? Inspecting a hotel room by room is a really hard and time-consuming task to do every day. But it shouldn’t be a guest’s task either. 

Today autonomous bed bug prevention systems are becoming more common. By working autonomously around the clock, these systems capture bed bugs early enough before they become a problem. Letting the system do bed bug monitoring saves both the guest’s and hotel’s time and nerves. The time spent on manual checkups can and should be used on something else - liking fixing up a drink ;-)