The disadvantage of treating instead of preventing bed bugs in hotel chains

When it comes to bed bugs, prevention is better than treatment. Once you get bed bugs in a hotel, this elusive pest can be very hard to eradicate as they can live a long time without food and are notoriously good at hiding. Depending on the number of rooms affected, the cost of a bed bug treatment can make a big hole in your hotel’s budget.

Treating a hotel room for bed bugs can be a costly situation. Not just considering the actual pest control cost, but the lost revenue when moving a guest to another room and closing off the room for the time of the treatment. Often the adjoining hotel rooms on the sides, above and below, also need to be closed off and treated.

The cost of a bed bug infestation

According to a study ordered by the U.S. Department of Health (NIH), the average cost of a bed bug infestation is just over 6,000 USD1. This sum included the cost of the treatment, furniture replacement and lost revenue for the room. In addition to these costs, hotels also run the risk of their hotel guests giving them negative reviews on for example TripAdvisor. The study estimates that revenue per hotel room decreases by 38 USD for each negative review published. Of all the hotels surveyed, as many as half had to pay damages to affected hotel guests, at an average cost of 20,000 USD1. 

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Invest in preventive solutions

Unlike traditional methods and pesticides that are used when a bed bug infestation is a fact, we focus on preventive solutions at Nattaro Labs. Solutions that you can forget about and leave to do their job once installed. If the room gets a bed bug problem, our solutions prevent an epidemic spread from happening and so the problem is much easier to handle with lower costs for bed bug treatment. 

Bed bug tape and mattress covers on hotel beds

We offer several preventive products for bed bugs. Our Nattaro Safe® bed bug tape is a long-term solution with long-lasting treatment. For a bed you need approx. 6 metres of bed bug tape. That gives a cost of approx. 0.05 USD/bed/day for 2 years. Our mattress cover Bed Bug Protector can be used on hotel beds to protect the bed frame and facilitate visual inspections of the bed. The investment of installing these proactive solutions on your hotel beds can be weighed against the cost of a possible emergency treatment that offers no preventive effect, night staff on call, litigations and bad reviews on TripAdvisor. Both you and your hotel guest can go to bed with peace of mind.

 

Learn more about bed bugs in the hotel industry

 

Sources:

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6462087/