Hotels' biggest sustainability blind spot is in the spray bottle
Protect your hotel from bed bugs
If a plumber told you only 5% of the water he ran reached the tap, you'd fire him on the spot. If an electrician said 95% of the current vanished into the walls, same thing.
Your pest control vendor is telling you exactly this, every treatment. Nobody is firing anyone.
Only about 5% of a typical neonicotinoid application stays on the target. The other 95% goes somewhere else: air, carpet, drain, and eventually the soil and water outside the building.
Hotels are among the largest indoor users of neonicotinoids in the world, and almost none of that usage is tracked at the corporate level.
Your hotel tracks water and energy to the decimal point. You know how much coffee ground waste the F&B team generates on a Tuesday. You almost certainly don't know what chemical is in your guest rooms right now, who sprayed it, or where it's gone since.
That's the gap this post is about.
What pesticide do most hotels use?
Neonicotinoids. They're the standard chemical against bed bugs and some of the most effective insecticides ever synthesised. They're also water-soluble, persistent, and highly toxic to insects of all kinds. That's not a side effect. That's the whole design. It's why they work, and it's why they don't stay put.
Once sprayed indoors, neonicotinoids move. Air moves them. Cleaning water moves them. A housekeeper's shoes move them. Because they're persistent, concentrations in surrounding soil and waterways keep climbing year after year rather than breaking down.
The chemistry doesn't care whether the insect it reaches is a bed bug in room 412 or a wild bee in the hotel garden.
Why pesticides don't show up in ESG reporting
Pesticide use has been omitted from the major hospitality ESG frameworks: GRI, Green Key, EarthCheck, LEED. That's beginning to change. The EU Ecolabel and BREEAM are now introducing pesticide criteria in their latest revisions. But for most chains today, pest management still sits inside housekeeping, gets approved property by property, and never rolls up into a corporate number.
A chain can report scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions to the decimal point while using neonicotinoids (imidacloprid, clothianidin, thiamethoxam) that the EU banned for outdoor agricultural use in 2018 after they were implicated in pollinator collapse. The ban didn't touch indoor pest control, which falls under a separate biocide regime. Imidacloprid and clothianidin are authorised there, with product labels listing hotels among the approved sites.
A property can be, on paper, a sustainability-forward operation and carry a chemical footprint nobody has ever quantified. Including the people running it.
Bed bugs are why hotels keep purchasing pesticides at all
In every hotel pesticide contract we see, the contract is essentially a bed bug contract in disguise. Take bed bugs out of the equation and the case for routine neonicotinoid use mostly evaporates.
The awkward part: bed bugs aren't really a chemistry problem. They're a timing problem. By the time a housekeeper notices one, the population has had weeks to breed, and that's the moment where reaching for the chemical starts to feel inevitable. Catch the same situation earlier in the curve and chemicals stop being the default answer.
Most of the pesticide volume flowing through hotels today is the price of finding out too late.
What changes when a hotel stops using pesticides?
Neonicotinoids have been linked to population declines in butterflies, mayflies, wild bees, and earthworms. None of those are species a hotel markets on its website. But they are the organisms that keep soil productive, water filtered, and plants pollinated. They are the quiet infrastructure behind every beachfront view, rooftop garden, and seasonal menu a hotel builds its brand around.
One property going pesticide-free, in ecological terms, barely registers. Three hundred properties, the size of the Valpas network today, start to register. Three thousand would matter a lot. The math compounds quickly once an industry starts moving in the same direction, which is why hotel groups often get credited with sustainability wins that look, on the surface, smaller than they actually are.
Where Valpas comes in
Most hospitality sustainability moves are gestural. On biodiversity, the rooftop beehive has become the visible symbol of that gesture. The instinct deserves credit. The next step is bigger.
Valpas allows every hotelier to go beyond the gesture by removing pesticides from the rooms below, preserving the wild pollinators, butterflies, and pollinating insects that were already living in and around the property. Every hotelier becomes a part-time beekeeper, not by adding a hive, but by no longer harming the bees that were already there.
Valpas is the certification standard for permanently bed bug-safe, pesticide-free hotel rooms. Continuously verified at room level, independently audited by Bureau Veritas, and run today across more than 300 properties in 60+ destinations including Marriott and Aman.
TLDR;
What pesticide do most hotels use for bed bugs? Most hotel bed bug treatments rely on neonicotinoids, chosen because they're highly toxic to insects and stay active for months. That persistence is also why the chemistry doesn't stay confined to the room it was sprayed in.
Are pesticides included in hotel ESG reporting? Not yet in any meaningful way. The major hospitality frameworks (GRI, Green Key, EarthCheck, LEED) have historically omitted pesticide use, though the EU Ecolabel and BREEAM are now introducing pesticide criteria in their latest revisions. For most chains today, pest management still sits under housekeeping and isn't aggregated at the portfolio level.
What does "5% stays on target" actually mean? Only about 5% of a typical neonicotinoid application remains on the target. The other 95% migrates via air, dust, water, and contact, which is why "indoor" pesticide use is not meaningfully confined to the indoors.
Is there a pesticide-free way to manage bed bugs in hotels? Yes, two ways. Reactively, infestations can be treated with heat rather than chemicals, an established alternative when an infestation is already present.
To eliminate the financial and reputational losses of infestations altogether, there is now a permanent pesticide-free standard too: Valpas is the certification standard for permanently bed bug-safe, pesticide-free hotel rooms. Continuously verified at room level, independently audited by Bureau Veritas, and run today across more than 300 properties in 60+ destinations including Marriott and Aman.
What should a hotel sustainability team do first? Ask your pest control vendor for an annual inventory of active ingredients used across every property. Most teams discover the data isn't tracked centrally. That inventory is usually the first time pesticide use has ever been quantified at the chain level, and it tends to be where the real conversation starts.
The takeaway
Hotels are among the largest indoor users of neonicotinoids in the world, and almost none of that usage is tracked at the corporate level. The fix isn't a new sustainability program. It's one honest question to the pest control vendor: what's in this, and where does the other 95% go?
Most sustainability teams quantifying pesticide use at the portfolio level have never done it before. The first move is asking your pest control vendor for an annual inventory of active ingredients used across every property. If you want a template for that question, we have one, and we're happy to walk through the answer with you.