Some tourists come to Colorado looking for the “Wild West.” However, I don’t think bed bugs are what they have in mind. The Durango Herald, in Durango, Colorado, reported Tuesday on a recent bed bug encounter in a Cortez, Colorado hotel:
German tourists Billy and Helga Held didn’t travel to Cortez to have a close encounter with bedbugs, but that’s exactly what they got.
In the wee hours of Aug. 18, before they were to visit Mesa Verde National Park, the couple awoke at 1:21 a.m. to discover bugs in their bed at the Comfort Inn.
“At first I was in a panic,” said Billy. “My bedsheet was completely full of bed bugs. My wife was crying.”
Helga stripped the sheets and took them straight to the reception desk.
“The boy at the front desk took them and just put them in the washing room,” she said. “He said, ‘Do not make a big deal of this – you can move to a new room.’”
Oh that’s very reassuring! Customer service these days…
In fairness, the hotel did call out a pest control operator, and refunded the couple’s room costs.
Comfort Inn Owner, Ryan Griglak, said their hotel has tried to be as proactive as possible in controlling bed bugs – by employing Orkin to spray as well as relocating the people to another room.
Griglak said after Orkin inspected all the rooms, they found the only two infested were the two where the German family had been.
They were moved to a second room, and these two rooms were the only ones found to be infested!
Let this be a warning to hoteliers who simply move people to the next room, without attempting to help them decontaminate their belongings first.
The article also reports that the branch of Orkin in Cortez has had a 50% increase in bed bug calls in the past year. You can read the rest of the article here.
