Most days someone writes in asking where to find a bed bug-safe room. Almost none of these travellers ask how the certification works or who verifies it; they want to know where to book.
In late July one of them asked whether the hotel she was booked into in Reykjavik for mid-August was bed bug safe. It was not a certified property, so we told her we could not speak for those rooms. She then explained why she had asked at all. She was travelling with a tour operator, every hotel on the itinerary was already booked, and nothing we said was going to change where she slept. She wanted to know regardless.
Three weeks later, at the other end of the same behaviour, a guest reviewed his stay at Hotel Le Mareuil in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. He wrote four hundred words about the terrace, the bakeries on Jean-Pierre Timbaud, the shower, the welcome at the front desk. Between a note on the bedding and a note on the storage, he added this in brackets: "the hotel has adopted the Valpas system to fight against bed bugs, which is very reassuring."
Between the bedding and the storage room, bed bug safety was one of the things that made the room good.
Our inbox and chatbot is just a fraction of what is happening. The wider view comes from Phocuswright, which surveyed 1,082 travellers across the U.S., U.K. and France this year and found pests to be the number one booking concern in every segment, economy through luxury. Seven in ten of those travellers already take precautions before a trip, more than half inspect the room when they arrive, and only a third think they would recognise a bed bug if they saw one. In the U.K. and France, bed bug safe is the highest-rated guest room attribute of any. In the U.S. it is second.
Then there are the two figures that reach the revenue line. Seven in ten travellers say they would leave the brand they usually book for a certified competitor, and eight in ten say they would pay more for a certified room.
The traveller in Reykjavik typed her question into a chat window rather than emailing the hotel, and more of these questions are heading the same way. One in three travellers now use AI to book a trip (Adyen), and Booking.com's own sentiment research, across 37,325 respondents, found that travellers trust AI assistants more than travel bloggers.
Valpas certifies guest room condition in real time and puts that proof where people actually book: the hotel's own booking page, OTAs, AI assistants, corporate procurement. It is recognised by GSTC and WSHA and independently verified by Bureau Veritas, across 30,000+ rooms in 60+ destinations and 25 countries. Paris has more certified hotels than any other city in the world.
The alternative has no budget line. Reactive operations pull rooms out of service at the worst possible moment, land on the P&L without warning, and linger in review pages and, increasingly, in the summaries AI systems build from them. Certification replaces that with permanent infrastructure and a signal a guest can find before they book.
The guest in Paris described the certification in his own words, on a page the hotel does not own, as one of the reasons the stay was good. No campaign produces that sentence. The traveller in Reykjavik went looking for a certified room in a city where a tour operator had already placed her somewhere else, and asked even though the answer could not help her.
Travellers are already asking this about your rooms, on pages you do not control and in chat windows you never see. Whether they find an answer there is the part a hotel can still decide.
See which hotels are certified here.
