Triage · after travel

You just got back from a trip. Here's the next 24 hours.

The window is now. If a bed bug rode home with you, it's still in your luggage and clothes, it hasn't yet escaped into the mattress or behind the baseboards. Don't unpack in the bedroom. Hours, not days, is the right unit.

Right now

  1. Don't take the suitcase into the bedroom. Open it on the balcony, in the garage, in the bathtub or in the kitchen, anywhere with a hard surface.
  2. Strip clothes directly into a bag. Worn clothes from the trip and any from the suitcase. Seal the bag, walk it to the laundry.
  3. 60°C (140°F) wash + 45 min high-heat dry. For everything washable. The dryer is the more important of the two, high heat for 45 minutes kills bed bugs and eggs reliably.
  4. For unwashable items (leather, electronics, books): heat-treat them. Options: see the heat-treatment overview. A car parked in summer sun gets to 60°C+ inside, which works for the suitcase itself.

If you can't process the suitcase immediately

The best place for a possibly-contaminated suitcase to sit is a sealed plastic bag in a non-bedroom location, garage, car, balcony. Worst place is the closet or under the bed. If you need 48 hours before you can heat-treat: seal the suitcase into a large clear plastic bag with a pest strip (commercial insecticide strip, ~$5 at any hardware store). The strip kills anything in the bag in 24-48 hours.

What's the actual chance you brought something home?

For most travelers most trips: low. For travelers staying in properties with recent bed bug reviews: meaningfully higher. For people staying in hostels in heavy-traffic cities: real. The post-travel protocol above costs you 40 minutes of laundry; the cost of an infestation is in the thousands. Math is overwhelmingly in favor of the routine even when the probability per trip is low.

For future trips, the 5-minute hotel check on arrival cuts the probability further.

If you find bites in the next week

Don't assume you missed something during the trip, bed bug bites can show up days late, especially in people getting their first exposure. Switch to the bite-triage path: I think I have bites.