An innovative company in New York City called Advanced K9 Detectives LLC now has a certified group of canines for hotel hire.
According to the company's website, their four-legged detectives can search the average guest room for bedbugs in seconds, er, minutes flat. Two minutes, to be exact. That means the shaggy sleuths can help a mid-size 500-room property entirely eradicate any or all bedbug infestation in about a week. So what are America's hotels waiting for?
Let's say it loud and clear first of all: we don't think that the Jurys Boston Hotel has bed bugs. And they don't either, but they're using something special to make sure that it remains that way and they never have a case of ex-guests feeling itchy and bad-mouthing them to the world.
It's not a high-tech solution at all, but a cute one instead: Jurys Boston has a kind of a contract with a bed bug sniffer dog. Every three months, the dog takes a walk through all 225 rooms at the hotel and barks if he finds the vaguest scent of a bed bug or its eggs.
Late last year the sniffer dog barked in two rooms: as a result, Jurys fumigated both the rooms and burned the mattresses, even though they'd had no guest complaints. We kind of like this low-technology approach to make sure we have a good night's sleep without any bites or other nasty surprises.
A Fordham University senior is suing the New Yorker Hotel after the room she was placed in as substitute dorm room she claims was infested with bed bugs.
Michelle Hopkins filed a suit yesterday after the insects allegedly feasted on her in the Manhattan hotel that doubled as her dorm.
"I can't sleep anymore, I haven't slept in forever," Hopkins said, breaking into tears in her lawyer's office. "I'm petrified."
A student housing crunch at Fordham led Hopkins to find a room through Educational Housing Services, which leases four floors of rooms from the New Yorker Hotel at Eighth Ave. and 34th St
Colleges often use nearby hotels as a way to supply rooms to students but we were surprised the New Yorker was being used as a dorm since it is undergoing a huge renovation with completion expected around August 2008. Additionally, Hopkins is suing the hotel's owner and manager which happens to be Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and Ramada Worldwide. Moonies own a hotel?
It's still going through the process, but an Arkansas woman is suing Stone Inns hotel over a bed bugs incident. The grounds for her complaint aren't pretty: she claims that during her stay in the Siloam Springs motel while undergoing cancer treatment,
She was infested by hundreds of bed bugs during a stay there and now suffers recurring nightmares of bugs feeding off her body.
The motel owner reckons the health department inspected Stone Inn's twice and the bed bugs must've come from somewhere else. The jury's out ... but the guest's trying for compensation for medical bills, pain, and embarrassment and humiliation.
[Ed. Note: This is the Bad Rate in our Good Rate/Bad Rate feature. Enjoy.]
When booking a hotel, the rate doesn't tell the whole story. What looks like a bargain could turn out to be hell on Earth. When the hotel is pegged as one of "the 10 dirtiest hotels in the U.S.," it's really time to steer clear. Apparently that's the case with the Hotel Carter in New York City, which came in at #2 in the dirtiest category on TripAdvisor's new traveler survey.
[Publisher's Note: I moved the rest of this story including the photo after the jump--it is just too disgusting for the front page. Feel free to go here to check it out, sickos.]
When you thought only crappy roadside motels and budget inns were prone to bed bugs comes this report that a Manhattan couple visting the Mandarin Oriental in London was allegedly attacked by bed bugs during their recent stay.
Sidney Bluming, a prominent New York celebrity lawyer, and his wife, Cynthia, are suing the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, owner of the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, after staying at the fashionable London hotel last May.
According to the lawsuit, which is seeking several million dollars in damages, the Blumings were bitten hundreds of times during their five-night stay leaving their skin red, swollen and itchy. A spokesman for Mr Bluming, whose clients include Elizabeth Taylor and Claudia Schiffer, said: "People associate bed bugs with more of a lower-end class of hotel. Clearly that's not the case here; the Mandarin is as premier and luxurious as any hotel could make themselves out to be.""
A hotel spokesperson confirmed that there was an isolated infestation incident in one of the Mandarin's nearly $1,000 rooms but that there have been no more reports since.
Unfortunately, that is of little condolence to the Bluming's who found bed bugs nested in their luggage and clothes even when they returned to New York. Their apartment had to be fumigated and several personal effects thrown away.
We can't help but wonder--is this the newest bed bug trend? Luxury hotel infestations?
It's still going through the process, but an Arkansas woman is suing 
