It’s mainly a problem if you live in shared housing or an appartment block with shitty neighbours.
Experts + coordinated efforts and it’s quite easy to solve. Heat, steam, pesticides, diatomaceous earth(especially around chair/bed legs), regular vacuuming, regular tumble drying, matras covers, and plastic bin bags left in the sun.
People exagerate how difficult it is. If it was as difficult as some people say, hotels would no longer exist. Every hotel has problems with bed bugs on occasion.
When you travel, have the contents of your suitcase in a plastic bin bag. Avoid hotels with carpeting. Bed bugs hate tile floors, really hard to move across them. Also, if you have tiles at home, you can simply use bleach to mop the floor. The fumes alone already kill plenty of the buggers.
Some decent advice right here. In many years of regular hotel stays, I have had exactly two encounters with them. There was no issue with cross-infestation. They don’t travel that easily, as you say.
What gets me is that prevention is so easy-peasy, in theory:
- no carpets
- foam or other cavity-free mattress
- impervious mattress cover
Done. And yet hotels still have these monstrous sprung mattresses, which accumulate dust and mites and are basically black boxes for infestation of all kinds. Usually protected by a single layer of dirty synthetic fiber. Yuck.
