After Travel: Keeping a Hotel Room’s Bed Bugs Out of Your Grand Rapids Home

At the hotel

• Luggage on the rack or in the bathroom, never on the bed or the carpet, for the whole stay.
• Before unpacking, strip the corner of the fitted sheet and look at the mattress seam and the headboard, the same two places you would check at home. What to look for →
• If you find evidence, ask for another room on a different floor, and tell the desk in writing. In Michigan a hotel is a dwelling under the Housing Law; the state manual says the law “covers most dwellings used for living or sleeping,” including “hotels and motels,” and in Grand Rapids a “hotel unit” needs the same Certificate of Compliance as a rental (1000.1). We have not read a hotel-inspection program for Kent County and do not describe one.

When you get home

1. Unpack in the garage, the laundry room or on a hard floor, not the bedroom, and not on the sofa.
2. Everything that was in the suitcase goes in the dryer first, worn or not. MSU Extension’s travel article: “Dry on medium or high heat as well, and keep the items in the dryer at that setting for at least 30 minutes.” The dryer is the kill step. Wash afterward if you like; MSU says the wash water should ideally be “100 degrees Fahrenheit to 120 degrees Fahrenheit,” which is a hot cycle, not a kill on its own.
3. Items that cannot be washed, a jacket, a soft bag, a stuffed toy, go straight in: MSU, “items that can’t be laundered can be put directly into the dryer at medium to high heat for 30 minutes.”
4. The empty suitcase: vacuum the seams, the lining pockets and the wheel wells; bag the vacuum contents and put the bag outside, as MSU’s prep article instructs; then seal the case in a large plastic bag until the next trip.
5. Shoes, toiletry bags, books and chargers: inspect in good light; bag what you cannot heat.

Why the dryer and not the washer

The figures line up. The state manual puts the upper lethal temperature at 120°F, “causing death within minutes,” with “longer exposures to temperatures above 113° F” also lethal. A household dryer on high exceeds that; a warm wash does not reliably. That is why MSU’s rule is thirty minutes of dryer time rather than a wash cycle, and why its one-line summary of the subject is “Heat treatments are effective at killing bed bugs.”

The sealed suitcase

The Michigan sources this site relies on do not state how long a bed bug can wait in an empty suitcase, so we will not give a number. MSU’s rule for sealed items is to keep them sealed “until they can be thoroughly inspected or enough time has passed that bed bugs are dead – at least a year.” A vacuumed suitcase in a sealed bag in the garage is a suitcase you can forget safely until the next trip.

Cold does not do it on the porch

The manual: bed bugs “can survive freezing temperatures (32° F) for days and tolerate much lower temperatures (5° F) for short periods,” and freezing items is effective only “at <0°F for two or more hours,” which is “colder than most household freezer compartments.” A Grand Rapids winter night may get there; a mild one will not, and the dryer always does.

If bites start within a couple of weeks of a trip

Inspect the bed before anything else: seams, box-spring corners, headboard. Bites alone prove nothing, but a trip followed by bites is the one pattern that earns an immediate look at the seams. If you find anything, do not spray, and call. An early inspection of one bed is the cheapest treatment there is.