Traveling today is full of challenges: flight delays, squeezing everything in your carry-on, finding phone service, dealing with long lines. It’s good to get to your hotel room where you feel safe and secure. But be alert. When traveling to the bigger cities and even small towns, you may pick up something you don’t want to bring home. You know what I mean. Everyone is talking about it.
Bedbugs.
Seems like no level of hotel is immune — the most expensive New York five-star or the small cottages of northern Wisconsin. They are everywhere and they travel home with you and into your closets, beds, couches, … everywhere. They are difficult to eradicate and the process is costly employing every technique from bedbug sniffing dogs, to putting all your furnishings into a refrigerated truck overnight. It is something you don’t want to experience.
So how do you avoid it? One way is to ask the hotel and another is to check the mattress for bedbug waste along the mattress seams. But here is another: Go to http://www.bedbugregistry.com. It is a place where you can enter your hotel name and see if anyone has reported problems in the past. (No assurance as to what might have happened since then.) This is all consumer-provided so it is not perfect, but it is a helpful step.
Hotels, of course, hate this problem and they work hard at prevention and eradication. But it is not occurring just in hotels, dorm rooms and student living areas are another place where they can breed. (Don’t you wonder about those students who are picking up a couch off the curb for their new apartment?)
Two final notes. From what I understand, the problem was the worse on the East coast. I checked over 30 Madison hotels on the registry and they all passed with a clean bill of health. Secondly, what did you think I meant by the headline?
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