What is pest control in a hotel? How do hotels prevent roaches, bugs, and other insects? In this guide, we’ll try to look at various hotel pest control methods and their attendant cost.

You don’t have to wait until pests start keeping customers away from your hotel to develop a good pest control strategy for it. You would be saving yourself and your hotel lots of embarrassments and financial loss by putting in place a measure that keeps all kinds of pests away from your hotel.

Are you having a pest problem at your hotel? Have you discovered some cockroaches, bed bugs, rodents, and other pests at your hotel and need ideas to get rid of them?

On this webpage, we will thoroughly explain what hotel pest control is all about, the importance, methods, procedures, and what it would cost to get it done.

Hotel pest control here has to do with the prevention and the treating of pest infestations in hotels. It focuses on putting in place the best management strategy or system to ensure that guests do not have all kinds of pests crawling all over their rooms and bodies.

The Importance Of Pest Control In Hotels

According to a study by Dr. Mike Potter of the University of Kentucky, pests (bed bugs in particular) are the number one reason a guest would change hotels immediately.

As a hotel owner, taking proactive measures to control pests in your hotel is very important to the success of the business in general. Below are just some of the reasons we arrived at this conclusion:

  1. It passes across the message to your customers that you care more about their comfort than you do about their pockets.
  2. A nice, clean and pest-free room is a marketing strategy of its own. It will keep your customers coming back and even attract new ones.
  3. You stand the chance of getting positive free reviews on social networking platforms e.g Facebook, Google Business, and your hotel’s website.
  4. It will help save your business from different fines and lawsuits from government authorities that monitor and control the hospitality industry in the country.
  5. It will save you from unnecessary loss of income and also boost your reputation in the area you operate.

These and many more, are the importance of hotel pest control. Let’s go on to talk about the methods involved.

Effective Pest Control Methods For Hotels and Lodgings

Three main pest control methods are very effective in keeping hotels free from all forms of pests. We will discuss each of them extensively below.

  • Mechanical Method

This method of hotel pest control involves the use of equipment, light tools like traps (for insects and rodents), brushes and vacuum cleaners to keep pests out of the hotel.

The equipment (like the traps) are carefully positioned in such a way that they can catch pests and hold them down for as long as needed.

  • Physical Method

The physical method here has to do with the use of equipment that helps control things like the temperature of a room, the humidity, and the amount of light that enters it.

Most pests like bed bugs and cockroaches prefer to stay in dark corners and crevices of a room. They are also known to abstain from places with high temperature as that always lead to their death.

By heating your hotel rooms occasionally, you will be killing a lot of these pests in the process. Enough light in a room also has a way of keeping them away, forcing them to remain in hiding, away from the eyes of your guest.

  • Chemical Method

This is the last on this list but it’s not the least. The chemical method is the most effective way of dealing with pest infestations. It is also the fastest method of three listed here.

This method consists of the use of EPA approved chemicals specially formulated to repel and kill pests, in a bid to treat the hotel rooms and surroundings.

Following the guidelines of the pesticide manufacturers, you can use the products to completely eradicate pests from your hotel or have any of your staff do it. You can also hire the services of companies that are experts at dealing with pests to get rid of them from your hotel.

This method is known to be so effective that you can be rest assured it will wipe out all the pests in a very short time.

Once you have decided on the method of pest control to apply in your hotel, the next thing is to learn where you can find the pests.

Hotel Pest Control Checklist

Here is a list of places you’re likely to find pests in the hotel and the kind of pests that often stays there.

  1. Garbage Area

Pests like ants, cockroaches, flies, and rodents are common in the area where garbage is usually disposed around the hotel.

  1. Laundry

Here you will likely find cockroaches, spiders, and rodents.

  1. Swimming Pool Area

The area surrounding the pool is commonplace to find mosquitoes, cockroaches, wasps, and occasionally bees.

  1. Bathrooms

You will likely see pests like ants, cockroaches, and spiders in the bathrooms of the hotel. Ensure you treat these places very well since they are one of the easiest places pests show themselves to guests.

  1. Guest Rooms

Pests like ants, bed bugs, cockroaches, etc, are known to always crawl the walls of the rooms usually occupied by the guest. If you don’t find them on the walls, check behind the headboard, under the bed, and so on.

  1. Kitchen

This is commonplace to find flies, ants, cockroaches, rodents, and other kinds of pests.

  1. The Entrances

The entrances of the hotel are among the places flies, ants, and mosquitoes are usually found. The flowers are a good place to check for any pest occasionally.

Hotel Pest Control Procedures

The procedures involved in hotel pest control depends on the type of pest and the control method being used.

  • For Rodents

The procedure used in rodent control involves the use of monitoring devices that detects their movement. Through the help of such monitors, bait stations are put in such a way that the rodents can easily be trapped by them.

  • For Flying Insects

Flying insects are often treated using baits and insecticides (mostly sprays) at night, once or twice in a month. The insecticides that are usually sprayed at them are those that have been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency and are not too toxic for humans.

  • For Crawling Insects

In eliminating this type of pests, monitors are also used to observe their activity. After that, baits alongside insecticides are used to eliminate them.

For all types of pest control, it is always advisable to begin by putting in place monitoring devices that will help you track their activities. After that, you can use mechanical baits and pesticides to capture as many of them as possible.

Cost Involved

When it comes to hotel pest control, there is no fixed cost for it. The amount of money it would cost to completely get rid of the pests depends on the method of pest control, the size of the hotel, and the number of times it is done in a month.

Apart from that, if you are going to be employing the services of a pest control professional, you can be sure that it will cost you quite some amount of money to get the job done.

One way you can keep the cost down is by having your staff handle the pest control at your hotel themselves.

On average, treating pests like rodents, bed bugs, and cockroaches will cost you at least $2000. The figures can be more or less depending on the aforementioned factors.

Practical Measures To Prevent Pest Infestations At Hotels

Pest infestation is one thing that can keep customers away from your hotel and completely ruin your reputation very fast. Though it is difficult to prevent pests from gaining entry into your hotels completely, there are practical steps you can take to stop them from damaging everything you’ve labored for.

Below is a list of things you could do to prevent pest infestations in your hotel.

  1. Get your staff informed on how to easily detect an infestation. A staff who is properly trained on how to easily identify pest infestations is a great asset to a hotel. The more knowledgeable your staff are about checking for bed bugs, cockroaches, and rodents, the more they will be able to stop them from causing damages in the hotel.
  2. Keep garbage cans far from the walls of the hotel. The closer they are to the walls, the easier it will be for pests to move from there to the walls. They must always be tightly closed.
  3. Seal up the places through which rodents regularly enter the hotel.
  4. Always ensure that food and other debris are properly disposed of.
  5. Have pest control experts regularly check the hotel to identify and avoid any form infestation on time.

In Summary

Pest infestation is a hotel that can lead to a serious loss in income. In some cases, allowing it to go untreated for a prolonged period could even attract some penalties from the government authorities that oversee the activities of hotels in the country. That is one reason you must deal with it while it is still early.

In this article, we have discussed some helpful tips about hotels pest control that will go a long way to help you as a hotel owner.

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