Why Bedbugs Are Infesting Trains, Planes and Hotels

The dark blood spots on her pillow were the horrifying clue. Hannah Stephenson woke at a Travelodge in Cambridge with itchy arms, but it was only after noticing red streaks across the hotel bedding that she suddenly understood what had happened.

When she pulled back the sheets, bedbugs were crawling across the bed. “I was just like: ‘Oh my God.’ I was freaking out,” she recalls.

What began as a handful of red bumps on her arms quickly became much worse. “As the day went on, they got more and more red, swollen and inflamed,” says Hannah, 31, a travel content creator. The bites soon spread to her face and other parts of her body.

Within days, more than 100 red welts covered her face, arms, legs and torso. The itching was unbearable and left her feeling deeply self-conscious. “They were so gross, they were disgusting,” she says. “I was horrified.”

Hannah’s experience comes as pest-control specialists warn of a sharp increase in infestations involving the notoriously resilient insects — a surge some have dubbed “peak bedbug”.

Rentokil says confirmed bedbug activity in the UK rose by 44 per cent year on year between 2023 and 2025. Meanwhile, JG Pest Control says it has carried out more than 5,000 bedbug-related visits in the past 12 months.

Recent bedbug outbreaks have been reported in hotels, trains and aircraft. Last week, six Southeastern services were cancelled after suspected bedbugs were found on trains travelling between Kent and London. The cancellations followed two incidents last month in which bedbugs were discovered in drivers’ cabs operated by the same train company.

Social media users have also alleged bedbug sightings at other Travelodge and Premier Inn hotels, as well as at properties elsewhere in London. “This year does seem particularly bad,” says Professor James Logan, honorary professor of medical entomology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“Bedbugs are increasing globally, partly because they are becoming resistant to insecticides — the toxic chemicals normally used to kill them,” he says.

A report published last month in the Journal of Pest Science found that bedbugs carry different genetic signatures depending on their origins. Those differences may help the insects survive eradication efforts while evolving and strengthening their resistance to insecticides.

Increased travel is another factor behind their spread. Bedbugs are expert “hitchhikers”, clinging to clothing, luggage and bags, Professor Logan explains. Hotels provide ideal conditions because they accommodate large numbers of people who are constantly coming and going. Trains, planes and hospitals can offer similar opportunities. Earlier this month, a Qantas flight was grounded in Rome after bedbugs were reportedly seen moving around the economy cabin.

“But what we’re starting to see now is bedbugs in places such as offices, workplaces and pubs too,” Professor Logan says.

An infestation at The Guardian newspaper, reported last month, led to staff being allowed to work remotely and being given home bedbug “monitors”. These devices use special chemical attractants to lure insects out of hiding. At other London offices, employees have reportedly refused to attend work after colleagues disclosed infestations at home. Rising temperatures may be contributing to the problem. “Climate change is making it better for them and worse for us,” Professor Logan says.

In simple terms, warmer weather allows bedbugs to breed more quickly. “We’re looking at a future where we have more insects trying to share our homes — and that includes bedbugs,” Professor Logan says.

Bedbugs are nocturnal and are drawn to the carbon dioxide people breathe out. Their feeding process is remarkably efficient. Before piercing the skin with a straw-like proboscis, the parasite injects saliva containing chemicals that numb the area, meaning the bite often goes unnoticed. The saliva also thins the blood, allowing it to flow for the three to 10 minutes the insect needs to feed. It is this saliva that triggers the body’s itchy immune response.

Since welts may not emerge for up to a week, the bugs can establish a thriving community before anyone knows they’re there.

‘It’s usually four or five weeks before people realise they have a bedbug infestation, by which point they will have laid eggs and hatched out, and there might be hundreds,’ says Professor Logan. Since the tiny irritants need to be near their source of food – us – they hide in places where we spend time sitting or lying: bedding, mattresses, headboards, even the seams of your pyjamas. Once on clothes ‘you can spread them around pretty quickly’.

When Hannah realised what had bitten her, she complained to the Cambridge Travelodge hotel reception – but says she was shown little sympathy and merely told to fill out an online complaint form. Rushing home – she just wanted ‘to get out of there’ – she ‘had to strip off in the shed and hot wash everything that could go in the washing machine’.

The possessions that couldn’t, such as her sunglasses case, notebook and backpack, went into the freezer for ‘a month’.

The NHS suggests a hot wash of 60C for affected items, followed by tumble drying on a hot setting for at least half an hour. Items that can’t be washed should be put in a plastic bag and frozen for up to three weeks.

Cleaning wasn’t enough to spare Hannah the ‘ordeal’ of other people’s reactions, however. When she saw people staring at her bitten face and arms, she knew they were horrified. ‘I worried that people would think I was dirty or maybe contagious, because just from looking at me, you might not know what it was,’ she says.

She cancelled social plans and bought a last-minute long-sleeved dress for her cousin’s wedding, even though it was a heatwave, along with heavy make-up to try to disguise the bumps.

After waiting a week for a response from Travelodge, Hannah decided to take matters into her own hands. ‘I felt really frustrated and I was so uncomfortable and itchy and miserable that I was like, right, I’m taking this to TikTok now.’

Once she’d posted her account of what had happened, a number of other users commented to say they too had experienced bedbug bites in hotels. ‘I was really surprised at how common it seems to be.’

Hannah then heard back from Travelodge, which operates more than 600 hotels in the UK, and offered her £2,000 compensation.

A spokesman for Travelodge said: ‘The health, safety and comfort of our customers is our priority and we maintain stringent, expert-led measures to prevent and manage pest issues, including training our housekeeping colleagues to be vigilant and to spot early signs wherever possible.’

Hannah’s experience has made her view hotel stays very differently. On a recent trip away, she ‘stripped off the sheets and checked all the crevices of the mattress really closely’.

Hannah Shade, 30, also feels frustrated that her concerns weren’t taken seriously. In August, she stayed at Travelodge Monks Cross, York, on a family trip for her daughter’s tenth birthday.

‘I was bitten quite badly. I woke up after my first night with some bites but after the second night I had around 15 to 20 extremely itchy bites across my arm, hand, palm and fingers. Some were very swollen,’ she says.

She complained and was later told the room had been taken out of service.

The hotel then arranged a third-party pest inspection ‘which reportedly found no pests, but the report they sent me had significant information blurred out. They also confirmed the pest inspection hadn’t assessed the dark, mould-like residue I’d noticed on the mattress protector.’

A spokesman for the hotel said: ‘In the rare instance that an issue is reported in one of our hotels, we immediately take affected and surrounding rooms out of service for inspection and treatment by independent pest control experts.’

Following her stay, Ms Shade meticulously cleaned everything. ‘I had to isolate all our belongings outside when we got home and take precautions with our clothes and my daughter’s birthday presents because I was worried about potentially bringing bedbugs into our house. It ruined the trip,’ she says.

We urge children to sleep tight and not let the bedbugs bite for good reason. Along with redness and itching, bedbug saliva can trigger anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction), while scratching can lead to a wound that then becomes infected. ‘It also has a mental health impact as well, because when people have bedbugs, they become extremely paranoid,’ Professor Logan explains. ‘Even after the infestation is gone, some people become delusional, because the thought of creatures crawling around in your bed, which is a very private space, can make people feel they’re still there when they’re not.’

‘A lot of times I get called out to do an inspection because people think they’ve been bitten in a hotel and have brought something home,’ says pest controller Sarah Spratt, who calls herself the Bed Bug Queen. ‘Usually it is nothing and we have to help the customer calm down.’

Still, she admits that ‘this year’s the busiest I’ve seen it in the last decade. This summer seemed particularly busy for bedbugs and particularly busy for the more complicated cases.’ These include infestations in the homes of hoarders.

While hot washes or freezing can get rid of the insects from individual items of clothing, she says, pest controllers are always required in cases of infestation. The bugs are extraordinary escape artists and can spread between flats in apartment blocks or hotel rooms that share a wall.

Typical treatments involve hot steam (killing adult bedbugs requires temperatures of 48.3C, according to Rentokil, while eggs can only be blasted at 54.8C), or insecticides, which often require affected rooms to be temporarily out of bounds. Ms Spratt uses a desiccant dust called ChinChex, which means closing off treated rooms for an hour.

Her average price is around £500 for one session, which is all that’s needed to tackle the issue. It may seem steep but tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of damage can be done if the critters are not eradicated: the stain of the bugs’ own blood and their faeces can ruin furniture, wallpaper and carpets, while a severe infestation can produce a musty odour that requires a complete refit.

Professor Logan says that at one hotel he visited, £40,000 of repairs were required to fix bedbug damage in just one room. ‘They are a zero-tolerance pest – you cannot live with bedbugs,’ he says. ‘You have to get rid of them.’

Hannah Stephenson’s skin took a month to return to normal after the insects ruined her summer and she says she now has her own method of prevention: ‘I definitely won’t stay in a Travelodge again.’