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THE BENEFITS OF DETECTING BED BUGS EARLY
Bed bugs are a costly issue for hotels and impact the business in many ways. Extermination, guest compensation and lost revenue from rooms out of service are well known costs. But the expense is even deeper when negative online reviews and reduced customer loyalty are added.
The financial impact of bed bugs on your hotel can also increase depending on its size, location and type of guests. There’s nothing you can do to prevent bed bugs arriving in your hotel; it’s simply a case of when, not if, you have to deal with them.
The Cost of Bed Bugs
Compiling various industry information, Spotta found the total annual cost of bed bugs to be as high as €63,000 for a 200-room, mid-market hotel.
The combination of treatment, guest compensation, staff time in treating the problem, and short-term lost revenue contributes just 27% of this total. The longer term impacts of lost loyalty and reputation damage cover the other 73%. The company created a Cost Calculator which allows hotel teams to estimate the cost of bed bugs for the hotel size and bed bug occurrence rate.
Identifying Bed Bugs
Bed bugs grow to around 5mm in length. They can hide in mattresses, lamps and furniture, and a guest’s luggage. A hotel room offers them plenty of places to hide! They often come out at night, particularly if a food source – such as a hotel guest – is present.
Traditional monitoring techniques include sniffer dogs, pre-scheduled visits from professional pest controllers, and housekeepers conducting manual inspections. Their small size makes them hard to spot and correctly identify with the naked eye, resulting in missed identification from some traditional monitoring methods.
Spotta’s Smart Pest System
Designed for accommodation providers, Spotta is an easy-to-use technology solution to detect bed bugs. Their system can identify the pests when even just one bed bug is present, notifying you before an infestation takes hold.
In the year before using Spotta’s technology, hotel guests discovered 50% of bed bug incidents. This was reduced to just 3.3% following installation, with Spotta detecting 94.2% of bed bug cases and housekeepers finding the other 2.5%.
Benefits of Early Detection
Spotta’s smart pest system is ‘always-on’, monitoring and identifying bed bugs in occupied or empty rooms, at all times of the day or night. By detecting bed bugs early, you can act quickly and treat them in a targeted way. This will reduce both the reputational and the financial damage bed bugs can cause your business.
Early detection also brings environmental benefits because smaller populations means less chemicals are needed to remove the problem.
How Spotta Works
Spotta’s solution for bed bugs caters to the unique design and layout of your property. You will receive a Pod for each room, which is placed under the head of the mattress – where bed bugs are most likely to be found. The pods are wirelessly connected to a hub which makes sure the pods remain operational.\
Bed bugs are attracted into the pods by a pheromone, and they trigger a small camera. The photo from the camera is processed by Spotta’s bespoke AI algorithm, which confirms if it is a bed bug or a different type of pest. The pod then alerts the hub, automatically notifying you of the bed bug’s location. This lets you quickly isolate the problem and target your treatment, before an infestation can grow.
Proactive Monitoring
Spotta’s CEO, Robert Fryers, says: “For hoteliers, most of the overall financial impact of bed bugs comes from contact between a guest and the pests. This leads to complaints, bad reviews and often long-term loss of revenue. Our system helps to prevent this by proactively monitoring bed bugs in a cost effective way.”
Find out more about Spotta at www.spotta.co