24 OCT 2017: A woman from New Westminster travelling on a BA flight to London discovered a number of insects crawling out from the seat in front of her and, “pouring out of the back of the TV.” The flight was too full for her and her travelling companions to be moved, so they inevitably landed nine hours later covered in bed bug bites.

Canada does not mandate aircraft disinsection (the process of spraying insecticide) for planes arriving in or departing from Canada, as do some other countries, but infestations on airplanes are rare.

Years ago I was on a press trip with a writer who told me that at his wife’s behest, before opening his luggage in a new hotel room, he would lift the sheets and mattress protectors in each corner of the bed and scrutinize the piping for bed bugs. If there were no signs of red dust, he would only then open his bags and get settled in the room.

Eight percent of the 2,200 travelers surveyed by TripAdvisor have encountered bed bugs in hotels.

My daughter Lisa was moving to a new apartment in Halifax and a week before the move, her roommate discovered bedbugs in her room. The apartment got fumigated twice, but I decided to fly out to be sure Lisa didn’t move the parasites with her.

We met at her apartment where we stripped all the linen from her room. She did a steady sequence of laundry at the highest temperature and as every item came out of the dryer it was put into a large zip lock bag and thrown into the trunk of the rental car.

I vacuumed her mattress and took it out of the carpeted bedroom to the hall with laminate flooring, which we had also vacuumed. We sprayed the whole mattress with a steamer that surpassed a temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit and focused on the inside of the piping. There were slight signs of red.

I sprayed the mattress with rubbing alcohol and leaned it against the wall surrounding the floor around the mattress with Borax to add a barrier that bed bugs can’t walk over.

The mattress cleaning process was repeated for three days before we put it into a zippered mattress protector. But another challenge was to make sure that every night that we went back to our hotel we weren’t bringing anything with us.

Thankfully our hotel room had no carpet. We took turns entering the room, heading straight to the bathroom for a hot shower and putting the day’s clothes into a zip lock bag. We put on fresh clothes from my suitcase, which I had dropped off at check-in.

The process was tedious and decidedly ‘gross’ but I have fond memories of the late nights in the hotel room with Lisa and I avoiding any talk about bugs.

We got very silly and when fatigue set in, Lisa would say “good night” and I would say, “Sleep tight.”

And then she would say, “Don’t say the rest mom.”