A travel expert has gone viral on TikTok after sharing a genius way to check your hotel mattress for bed bugs.
These tiny, parasitic insects are predators who feed on blood, and they’re most active at night. They often live inside mattresses and bedding, hence their name. Their bites can be painful, itchy and cause unsightly rashes – definitely not something you want to have to deal with when you’re on holiday.
In October 2023, a bed bug epidemic brought Paris to a standstill, with hotel guests and locals alike suffering en masse as the insects ate away at their skin.
The streets of Paris were littered with piles of abandoned mattresses during the crisis, many just dumped on the streets, with some covered in plastic, reported the Daily Mirror.
However, it isn’t just visitors to France who should be worried: the tiny pests can be found in mattresses all around the world. They can also hitch a lift home with you in your suitcase, and then infest your home.
This is why it’s important to double check your hotel mattress isn’t riddled with bed bugs when you first enter your room – even before you unpack your case. And TikTok travel expert Kelly Cullen (@Kittykatkell) has shared a genius way to do that.
In the video, captioned “here’s a hack for your next trip,” she takes an iron provided by the hotel and runs it over the corner of the mattress to simulate the body heat that a person would put out – attracting the mites.
She explains: “If there are any present.. they would all come up to the surface, like, literally 50, hundreds… all would rise.” That’s a gross thought for sure.
Luckily, Kelly’s twin mattresses both passed the iron test, but if not she’d have beaten a quick retreat and either asked for a new room or skipped the hotel entirely.
To say the clip has gone viral is a bit of an understatement. It’s had over eight million views since it was first posted and over 1000 comments.
One hotel worker suggested another trick that you can use to check if a hotel might have bed bugs, saying: “Hotel worker here! You can also tell if a room ever had bed bug issues if you pull back the mattress and look at the bottom of the headboard.”
She goes on to explain that if bed bugs are present, “it’ll look like someone stabbed the headboard with a needle… little dots. They mess up the headboard like that of a room had a bad infestation.”
Someone else warned: “It only takes one bug to come home in your stuff and ruin your life. If they are at your Airbnb leave, because bed bug home treatment is like 5k.”
Another person shared: “Always thought my mom was crazy for not letting us even bring our bags into a hotel before she checked and one day we went to a hotel and our room had them and never questioned her again.”
She sounds like a very wise woman to us.
Join the Daily Record’s WhatsApp community here and get the latest news sent straight to your messages.