What is a night auditor? Was he reviewing your financial statements?

Night Auditor, when referring to hotels, is the person whom oversees front desk operations overnight (usually between the hours of 2300 and 0700). S/he audits the room's financials (room rates, incidentals etc).

What are they doing to ensure that none travel home with you? I'd be very concerned.

I got bed bugs in my bag from the airplane's overhead storage in Business Class. The suitcase that was checked did not have bed bugs.

Points taken. My travel companion and I were in that town for one night and we'll never know what was what in regards to the degree of infestation in that room that night.

We spent 2 hours in the room immediately after check-in, went out for a ~4 hour drive, spent another 2 hours in the room, found the bugs, changed rooms, then went out for dinner. Remarkably, we are each long time FT members with ~45 countries under each of our belts, and we were caught unawares and were not prepared with information on how to deal with the situation, ie we were googling as we went.

My friend planned to ask the front desk at check-out for plastic garbage bags to contain our carry-ons, but in the morning, we were so preoccupied with booking our $29 JetBlue Leap Day tickets (priorities!), we forgot, dashed to top off the rental car's gas tank and to the airport.

Anyway, a week+ has passed at this point, and the call of civic duty is fading. But I will call the hotel for an update as I told them I would.

So for (hopefully not) future information, what should the hotel have done to ensure we did not transport bugs?

After getting bedbugs at home for the SECOND time I'll post my experience:
I got them the first time eleven years ago from a national branded hotel in a university town. I had my house tented to get rid of them because it is one treatment and your done. In December 2015 I stayed at the SAME hotel (it is a highly rated Tripadvisor hotel) and I did a cursory inspection for bedbugs in the hotel room during a two night stay. Five days after returning home I saw evidence of bedbugs on my mattress. I emailed the hotel general manager and they have filed a claim with their insurance company to cover treatment of my house. I bought a chest freezer and now I take universal precautions and the suitcases and everything in them go in the freezer and stay there for 4 days.

For those of you who check, do you only look for live bugs? What about evidence of past infestation, brown spots, etc. The former obviously warrants a complaint to management what about the latter?

Checking only for live bugs is not enough, as my understanding is that a lot of times they only come out at night to suck blood then disappear again. So you look for feces (clusters of little dark spots that are essentially dried blood) or little streaks of blood stain. But I'm not really sure how to identify them, as I'm not an expert. And I only look under the sheets and between the mattress and box spring. That's probably not enough, but I don't have 15 minutes to do a thorough inspection each time I check into a hotel.

Yeah, I am probably not gonna rip the bed apart to check, but wondering what the bare minimum is and what the bar is for complaint.

My guess is, you're more likely to find bug feces rather than live bugs. I think finding something like that is certainly grounds for at least a room change. However, I also think that many hotels will try to blow off or counter against such complaint. They may not be swayed unless there's live bug (or at least a dead bug), even though online resources say that bug feces are evidences of infestation.

I remain amazed at how little interest there is in this topic. Bed bugs must be pretty darn rare. With about 100 different hotel stays a year for well over a decade all over the world in different types of lodging, I'd be a prime candidate to have this problem, but nothing. Fingers crossed.

I'm with you. I go through life doing none of the things others obsess over. I don't put the remote in a ziplock bag, I don't wash out the glasses with super hot water, I don't look for bedbugs, I don't travel with lysol spray and hose down the room, I don't travel with my own set of sheets. Yet, I've never had any health problems related to hotel stays.

I remember when I got bedbugs in my apartment several years back during college before I started traveling so no idea how they got into my apartment.

I noticed them in the summer when my roomate had already left back home for the summer so that made alternative sleeping arrangements easy by using his bed for a few days.

I had to throw away my bed and get a new one, but before I put the new one in I went to the kitchen and boiled a few pots of water. I took the pots and splashed it all over the walls and floor. Remember pesticides dont seem to work but no bug is immume to intense heat. You gotta fry them suckers.

Then gave a few days for my room to dry, then when I brought in my new bed I stuck the legs in a bowl filled with diatomecious earth just in case if there were any stragglers. The powder will kill any bug who tried to climb up to my bed.


Even at home, its usually a good idea to have your bed legs resting in a bowl of diatomecious earth. If you managed to bring a few bugs home with you and they try to get into your bed, they would be killed by the powder before ever reaching your bed.

I found one on my pillowcase right as I was falling asleep at a brand new national chain. I captured it in a cup and bag and brought to front desk. Was given a new room and in morning spoke with manager. She confirmed it was a bed bug and refunded my room. I stripped naked in garage at home and everything I had with me was in downstairs freezer for weeks. This was a nice hotel. I'd rather not mention the chain but was a $150/night room or so. Manager said she wanted my business back and to call her next time through. Well 8 months later when I was back in town they were top ranked hotel in town and rates were $225/night.

This can and does happen in all kinds of hotels. I spend a lot of nights in hotels and since that night I hardly ever sleep as well.

Another place bedbugs hang out is the the corner of the ceiling nearest the bed. You can see live bugs and/or brown dots (feces) there if it is a pretty bad infestation. When you are asleep, they drop on you from the ceiling.