We put your question to nearly 10 casino companies and stand-alone hotel-casinos, all of which ducked under the table. No "Profiles in Courage" there.
Our next step was the Southern Nevada Health District, where we ran into an old friend: Stephanie Bethel, formerly of Station Casinos. She referred us to Environmental Health Specialist Dan Slater, who took your bedbug queries in stride.
"You can’t prevent bedbugs," he led off. "They’re brought in by the guests." That means that even the cleanest hotel in the world can have a bedbug infestation. Hotels in Las Vegas, he added, have "very active pest-control measures. The first line of defense is the housekeepers … It depends on what they’re doing and, quite frankly, the nature of the clientele."
While bedbug complaints are regular, Slater says, he’s unsure how much of the actual incidence of bugs those calls represent. If bugs or telltale, black blood spots are found, both that room and the adjoining ones are shut down for "treatment. The mattress, if we get involved, is [discarded]," along with the box spring, according to the SNHD official. However, Slater’s district would have to receive a complaint from a hotel guest in order to have standing to intervene. The District makes sure the room in question has been cleared of bugs and charges a fee if it hasn’t.
Yes, some hotels employ dogs to sniff out insects. "They can be quite effective," Slater notes, with Labrador retrievers or German shepherds generally preferred. However, there is no regulation governing how often a mattress needs to be replaced. "I’ve seen some very old mattresses," Slater reports, although if they’re stained with bodily fluids, out they go.
"All the ones I see [removed] just go into the dumpster," Slater says, but some are refurbished and recycled, usually at facilities in Southern California. However, in order to do that, "There’s a whole lot of procedures you have to go through," including baking the offending mattress for 75 minutes at 320 degrees Fahrenheit.
While bedbugs are not known as disease carriers, an encounter with them is less than pleasant. If they’ve fed upon you, they leave a rash: a series of bites and a highly itchy blotch the size of a 25-cent piece. (Don’t scratch! That’ll just make it worse.) Small, subfusc blood dots will spot your sheets, too. The SNHD provides an extensive primer on these persistent little buggers.
Bedbugs gained notoriety in Vegas in recent years after the Tropicana was sold to Columbia Sussex. The latter, a company with a notoriously minimalist approach to staffing and maintenance, was soon experiencing reports of bedbug problems at both its Las Vegas and Atlantic City Tropicanas.
Since Columbia Sussex, a union-hostile company, was embroiled in heated confrontations both with the Culinary Union and its Atlantic City counterpart, Unite-Here, the bedbug battle soon become the main front in a wider war. The low point was reached in April 2008, when Columbia Sussex put a $25/head bounty on bedbugs at the Vegas Trop.
In a typical Columbia Sussex pennypinching move, the reward was contingent on the bugs being brought in alive. Of course, housekeepers might have a bit of difficulty capturing the insects, which are nocturnal by nature – what hotel cleans its rooms on the graveyard shift?
Most incidences of bedbugs in Clark County tend to involve private residences rather than hotels. Nor do the bugs need a nearby mattress in order to flourish. In March 2008, they invaded the Manhattan headquarters of Fox News. Given the amount of time that a bug-infested room must be quarantined and the extensive remediation measures required, hotels are actually in a better position to isolate the problem than is the average homeowner. After all, how many of us are able to afford to readily toss out our mattress and box spring?
