Hey, I’m Dylan with City Wide Exterminating and I want to share with you a few tips on how to prevent unwanted critters when you travel.
First thing is when you check in, what to do with your luggage. Most hotels will have a place you can set your luggage so you can unpack. You do not want to use that. That is where people bring their luggage in and sit it down, and that’s where the bed bugs come from and are introduced into the hotel. So, avoid setting the luggage down here or on the bed until you have had time to inspect the room. Instead set the luggage on a counter. They are safe places that bed bugs are pretty unlikely to be.
So, after we have the luggage put somewhere safe, we are going to grab a few things to do an inspection on the bed. This is just going to be a quick inspection using just what we have available to us. Being that we are not bed bug inspectors on this trip, and are on vacation, we don’t carry our flashlights and other tools. I’m going to show you some things you have that you carry with you that can help with bed bug inspections.
One is your cellphone. Use the flashlight app to look at dark crevices in and around the mattress. The second thing is if you brought it, and if not, most hotels provide one: is the hair dryer.
So let’s get started. We will first do a visual inspection using our flashlight app. Probably start around the headboard area and check the seams. In this case, we have a lot of pins and things to look around. So, we will do a visual inspection around the head board. Then move into the seams of the mattress. Pull up our flash light app. Turn the lights on in the room. Make it as bright as possible because these things are really small. And we will just go around the buttons and cracks and crevices looking for anything unusual. The headboard looks OK and we don’t see anything unusual on the headboard. In this case the headboard is too big to try to remove off the wall and I’m not going to try to do any of that.
We do have a way we can kind of see back there later, but we are going to continue on with the visual part of the inspection by moving on to the mattress. You want to get all the way down to the mattress itself. Again, with our flashlight app you are going to go in around the piping. This pillow top has two, we’re just going to pull the piping back and look for any type of critters or anything unusual. We will work our way around the entire mattress.
Our visual inspection on the mattress and headboard so far look good. In this case we don’t have a box spring. The mattress just sits on tops of this platform. So, we want to continue this inspection around the platform here the plywood meets the frame. Again, just checking cracks and crevices around the bed because that is where bed bugs like to hide. They love these cracks and crevices.
So now that our visual inspection is pretty much completed, keep in mind that you can take this as far as you want. You can disassemble furniture; just be sure you can put it back together and that you don’t break anything in the process. The more disassembling you do, the more access you will have to the hiding places and the more likely you are to find anything. But again, a high level inspection of the mattress and headboard is really going to tell you whether or not if you’re dealing with an infestation.
So outside of a visual inspection we are also going to utilize heat, which is pretty common in Bed Bug treatments. We’re going to use it as part of the inspection. So, using the hairdryer the hotel provides, we’re going to take it and go around the edges of the headboard that we can’t see. The idea is that we are going to take this really hot air and force it into the cracks. Were going to do it in a way that will push any bed bugs up and out of any crevices so that we can actually see them. Again, high temp and air movement should help with this. Again, not 100% but it is just something you can do to sleep a little easier tonight.
Now that we have cleared the primary area which is the mattress and the headboard, we want to move to the secondary locations using that flashlight app on the cell phone. Secondary places are places like the night stand. Any furniture in the room like a chair, footstool or suitcase rack are good places to check and make sure nothing is living there.
If you notice anything out of the ordinary, contact the front desk to let them know. Other than that, that’s about it. Those are some things you can do to make sure you stay Bed Bug free in your travels. So safe travels and thanks for watching!