Increase your direct bookings
Every decade or so, one guest need makes its way out of the back office and into the booking decision. Non-smoking rooms did it in the 1990s, Wi-Fi followed in the 2000s and sustainability in the 2010s, and each one began as something hotels handled quietly behind the scenes before becoming something guests actively filter for when they book. When we spoke at the Annual Hospitality Conference in Manchester in September, we argued that bed bug safety is the guest need of the 2020s, and that it is the first to reach bookings, operations and asset value all at the same time.
The demand is already there, and the research shows how strongly travellers feel about it. When Phocuswright surveyed 1,082 travellers across the US, UK and France this year, pests such as bed bugs came out as their number one concern when booking a hotel, ahead of cleanliness, value and staff. UK and French travellers went further still, ranking a guaranteed bed bug-safe room as their number one necessity, above non-smoking rooms and Wi-Fi, the very standards that came before it. What sets this need apart from those earlier ones is the stigma around it, so travellers tend to protect themselves quietly: 78% scan reviews before booking and 71% check the bed on arrival, yet only about one in ten ever raises it with the hotel.
Bed bugs travel with people, hidden in their luggage, so the more people travel, the more bed bugs travel with them, and it has nothing to do with how clean a hotel, plane or train is. In European capitals popular with British travellers, such as Paris and Amsterdam, the number of bed bugs travellers carry into hotels has grown 20–25% a year since 2023, with each one stopped on arrival.
Because hotel beds change guests every night, hotels are where bed bugs settle and where they set off from, onwards into homes, trains and planes. That makes the hotel the place where the response happens, never the source, and it means that if you stop bed bugs in the hotel, you stop them everywhere. The stories that reach the news are only the tip of the iceberg, whereas below the surface are the bed bugs carried into hotels every week and stopped on the first night. Those never make the headlines, but that everyday work is where the value sits for a hotel, which is why we talk about bed bug safety as one attribute with three returns.
The first return comes from guests who choose a hotel because it can show its rooms are bed bug-safe. In the Phocuswright research, 8 in 10 travellers said they would book a certified 4-star over an uncertified 5-star, 7 in 10 would leave their usual brand for a certified competitor, and 7 in 10 would also pay more for the room, at an average rate premium of 3.4%.
That preference only turns into bookings when guests can actually see it. Where the Valpas label appears in a hotel's own booking flow, direct booking conversion has risen by 8–12.5% across two hotel case studies, at RUNO Hotel Porvoo and GUESTapart in Aarhus, and in those same cases hotels earned €3–4 in new direct bookings for every €1 spent on certification. The same proof carries well beyond the hotel's own website too, into online travel agencies, corporate travel RFPs and AI assistants, including ChatGPT. That is increasingly where hotels are compared and chosen, and it is also where a claim with no verification behind it tends to drop out of the comparison altogether.
The second return sits on the operating side. Most hotels still deal with bed bugs only once they have appeared, which usually means rooms taken out of service, soft furnishings replaced, guests compensated and staff time lost, often right at peak occupancy. That reactive approach is also getting harder to rely on, because the strongest pesticides have been removed across the EU and UK under biocide regulation, bed bugs are now widely resistant to pyrethroids, and one in two pesticide treatments has to be repeated within 12 months.
Certified hotels work the other way round: bed bugs carried in by guests are stopped on the first night, before they can settle. That means rooms stay on sale, nobody has to be called out at short notice and the costs that would normally follow never arrive, which is why we put this return at around 2.5 times the outlay. There is also a cost that's harder to put a number on, since a single review now travels across booking platforms and into AI recommendations, and 1 in 2 travellers say one recent bed bug review would stop them booking. On top of that, certified rooms use no indoor neonicotinoids or pyrethroids, saving around 1.4 tonnes of CO₂e per room each year and keeping hotels ahead of where regulation is heading.
The third return is the one owners and investors were most interested in at AHC. Bed bug safety is the last physical condition of a hotel asset that has no standard data behind it, and it rarely features in due diligence today. We expect that to change, and when buyers, lenders and valuers do start asking, the hotels that can already document the condition of every room will be ready with the answer.
Because Valpas is installed in the room once and stays there, rather than being bought in as a recurring service, owners can treat it as an investment in the building itself instead of another running cost. That improves the operator's gross operating profit (GOP) and the owner's net operating income (NOI) at the same time. It also gives the property a room-by-room record of its condition, backed by a certification whose key criteria are independently verified by Bureau Veritas, which can be put in front of a valuer before due diligence even asks for it.
What ties the three returns together is that they all come from the same place. A room that is certified bed bug-safe in real time gives a guest a reason to book, takes a cost off the operator's books and gives the owner a condition they can document. As we put it at AHC, verified safety pays twice on the P&L and again on the balance sheet, and with guests already booking on it, the hotels that can show it are the ones that will be chosen, priced and valued for it.
The final step is simply naming it. Hotels that talk about bed bug safety as openly as they talk about Wi-Fi or sustainability turn a traveller's quiet worry into a reason to book with them, and that is the standard we are building with hotels today. We now certify hundreds of hotels across more than 60,000 beds in 60+ destinations, including Marriott and Aman properties, with key criteria independently verified by Bureau Veritas and recognition from the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) and the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance (WSHA).
