In its first year of real-world operations, Bed Pod has reduced the percentage of bed bug incidents discovered by hotel guests from 50% to just 3.3% in our hotel customers' properties.
Protecting hotel guests
The ‘always-on’ monitoring service covered 91,000 room nights across the UK and Europe from its inception in 2019. The Bed Pod enables hotels, other accommodation providers and their pest control partners to identify occurrences of bed bugs and treat the problem early, limiting the damage pests cause.
Success rate of 94.2%
Across the twelve-month period, our system was the first to identify bed bugs in 94.2% of cases, significantly reducing the number of guest encounters with bed bugs in multi-room properties.
Over 52% of detections were made in rooms with no recent history of bed bugs, demonstrating the system’s effectiveness as an early warning against new infestations. Repeat detections in rooms helped hoteliers assess whether extermination treatments were successful or needed further, deeper treatment.
“For accommodation providers, most of the overall financial impact of bed bugs comes from contact between the guest and pests, which leads to complaints, bad reviews and loss of revenue,” says Robert Fryers, Spotta’s co-founder and CEO. Read more about the Cost of Bed Bugs here.
“Defining success for the Bed Pod has always been ‘Does it alert the owner/operator to the presence of bed bugs before a guest discovers them?’. Our customers had previously experienced a 50% success rate at best in detection through their existing monitoring methods - meaning 1 in 2 bed bug incidents were first reported by guests. With Spotta, we’ve been able to reduce this to just 1 in 30 being found by guests.”
Spotta vs Traditional Monitoring Techniques
Traditional monitoring methods include sniffer dogs, pre-scheduled visits from professional pest controllers, and training housekeeping staff to conduct manual inspections. With bed bugs growing to a maximum of just 5mm in length, they are hard to distinguish with the naked eye resulting in understandable occurrences of missed identification.
During the Bed Pod’s first year, 94.2% of cases were successfully detected by Spotta, with guests reporting bed bugs accounting for just 3.3% of cases and housekeeping identifying the remaining 2.5%.
Proven Monitoring Solution for Bed Bugs
Fryers continues: “The first year results of Bed Pod show we have a credible, proven solution with real-world efficacy. This represents a meaningful step forward for pest controllers and hoteliers, helping them proactively monitor for bed bugs in a cost effective way.”
Find out more about the Bed Pod here or download our White Paper outlining the first year of Bed Pod.