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Bedbugs. Just the word can make some people feel icky.

There are plenty of places where bedbugs can be found, including some that may surprise you (like here and here). But a whole lot of them are found in hotels.

Bedbugs in hotels

We’ve gone over the cities with the most bedbugs, as well as how to look for them in your hotel room. We’ve also gone over how to not bring them home if you’re in the unfortunate situation of finding bedbugs in your hotel room.

How hotels get bedbugs

Bedbugs aren’t like bees, where they go from place to place, searching for a new location to call home. They’re brought in from the outside, most often by hitching a ride on ordinary people, like you and me, usually on their suitcase, but also their clothes, etc.

The good news (well, if bedbugs in hotels can ever be considered “good” news) is that when a hotel room has bedbugs, chances are excellent that they stay put. They don’t wander from room to room a whole lot, like cockroaches would. So you generally don’t have to worry about an infestation of the whole building.

How hotels treat bedbugs

From a hotel manager we know:

It’s reported to Corporate and the rooms beside, and above and below the room in question are checked. The room is treated, checked again to make sure they’re all gone and then it gets put back on the market. Depending on the treatment the hotel chooses, the room could be out for a few days or up to an entire month.

Bed bugs aren’t found every day. Not even once a month. MAYBE once every 6 months. I’ve worked at my current hotel for almost 3 years and we’ve had 3 instances of bed bugs. One was August of 2023, then December 2023, and the most recent one was in July of this year. The rooms weren’t even close to the same. The first one was on the 3rd floor, the other one was on the 4th, way down the hallway. The one this summer was also on the 4th floor, about halfway between the other two. So they weren’t spread in any way – if they were, the rooms adjacent to them would’ve shown signs and they didn’t. They were 3 separate instances.

But do hotels have to tell you if they’ve had bedbugs?

The answer is simple, yet unfortunate: no. These are the current state laws regarding bed bugs. As you can see, some state laws require:

• landlords to tell tenants if a building or apartment has bedbugs
• public school system with over 1 million children to inform parents if bedbugs were found on school property
• hotels to close off rooms infested with bed bugs until they’re treated and gone (well, I should hope so!)

But there are no laws that say a hotel has to make guests aware that they have or have had bedbugs. In fact, Oregon’s law says explicitly that:

The location, occupier identity, and detailed facts of a
bed bug infestation reported to an agency shall remain
confidential.

And if you think about it, that kind of makes sense. I mean, if hotels were obligated to tell you that they have or have had bedbugs, two things would happen:

1. No one would want to stay at that hotel

2. Every hotel would have to say yes, because it’s happened at pretty much every hotel, ever. They’ll have secret code words about it. They’ll quietly call the pest control company they’re contracted with to get rid of the problem. But while all that is happening, they just don’t tell you about it.

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary