Bed bugs enjoy biting popularity on travel website

Wed Nov 10, 4:28 PM

Marc Weisblott
Yahoo! Canada News

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The most popular new website for people booking hotels doesn't focus on the quality of room service, but fellow guests that may check in any time, with no intentions to leave.

Bed Bug Registry, created three years ago by San Francisco computer programmer Maciej Ceglowski, recently reached a tipping point of popularity due to the volume of tips coming in. The site claimed 50,000 daily visitors this summer, and around 100 reports a day, submitted from across the continent.

Toronto is currently represented by 2,770 individual bedbug reports, compared to 1,944 from Vancouver, where hotel managers recently attended a symposium for advice on how to rid of the blood-sucking critters.

Ceglowski makes no claim about the accuracy of submissions, but invites hotels to dispute any reports, while weeding out prank submissions. Yet he is also critical of mainstream media outlets that take bedbug sightings submitted to his site as indisputable fact.

Hotels are not the only locations referenced on the registry, however.

The reports include people refuting the existence of bedbugs in the apartment buildings they share.

Concern is also growing in medical facilities, like the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert, Sask., where bedbugs were sighted in two patient rooms last week.

Last month, CBC Winnipeg accessed information that revealed bedbug problems at the Health Sciences Centre, and inside books at two libraries.

Bedbugs were a fact of daily life, especially in large cities, prior to 1930, before the advent of pesticides that prevented their spread.

Better cleaning devices, and more simplified furniture design, are also cited as helping to limit their population.

But, for the past few years, there has been renewed currency to the rhyme "Goodnight, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite."

Media attention for the infestation reached fever pitch in August when bedbugs were found in the biggest movie theatre in Times Square.

The Waldorf- Astoria Hotel is also being sued by recent guests who claim they were bitten.

Later that month, the suggestion on Twitter that bedbugs found their way into a cinema preparing to host the Toronto International Film Festival caused a stir until pest control agents, accompanied by three dogs, determined within 15 minutes that there was nothing to fear.

This doesn't look good.