As a restaurateur or hotel manager, happy customers are your life blood.  With happy customers comes good reviews, and with good reviews comes more business.  In order to ensure the success of your business, you must go the extra mile to make sure every patron has an enjoyable experience without any missteps. The problem is that these two industries provide a very personal service where people demand perfection.  Even the smallest error in the service they receive can leave a bad taste in their mouth and leave your business under scrutiny.  Of these errors, one of the worst offenders is pests.

Imagine you are eating a fine meal at a restaurant and you notice a rat scurry across the floor.  Even if the meal was one of the best you’ve ever had, would you ever return to that restaurant or recommend it to your friends?  The same goes for a hotel stay.  Even the most luxurious hotel can have you running in fear if you pull open the bed sheets and find bed bugs. When pests enter your restaurant or hotel business they can create a public relations nightmare, a financial crisis, and sometimes even legal action. In order to ensure your customers are happy and no unforeseen complications with pests arises, the best action to take is proactively detecting for pests in your establishment.

Why Proactive Treatment

If customers detect pests in your business, the damage is already done.  Poor reviews will arise and possible legal action may be taken.  If you have a full infestation on your hands, this also means you may have to shut down and treat the problem before serving more customers.  Every day your business is closed is a missed opportunity to make money, and that is on top of a costly extermination.  With proactive treatment, you can get rid of the problem before it becomes an infestation.  It is much easier and more cost effective to treat a few pests rather than your entire premises.  This way you can maintain business operations while treating a minor pest problem.  The cost of proactive treatment and the removal of a few pests is much more affordable than an infestation extermination.  Also, with proactive treatment you can discreetly check your premises for pests without your patrons knowing.

There are a variety of methods to proactively treat pests in your business. You and your staff can perform searches on a regular basis checking common problem areas, you can set traps, or you could encase your mattresses in your hotel. However, these treatments can be time consuming, keep you from focusing on your business, and you may not be able to accurately detect a presence of pests in your establishment. Hiring a commercial pest control company is the best step to ensure an accurate and efficient pest detection is performed.

How Proactive Treatment is Performed

Trained professionals are much better at detecting the presence of small pests, especially bed bugs, as they leave few signs of their presence.  Through scheduled proactive inspections, the pest management company provides you and your business relief from invasive pests and greatly reduce the probability of an infestation. You can usually schedule inspections based on a monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly basis depending on your unique budget and bed bug concerns. The inspection will include a thorough search of your establishment looking for distinct signs that pests leave behind and will provide a confidential report once the sweep is completed.

Some pest management companies even employ the assistance of trained scent dogs to achieve greater detection accuracy.  These dogs are much better at finding small traces of pests at the beginning of an infestation, especially the pests that are hidden from view. Even the most experienced exterminators may miss a lingering bed bug, leaving the window open for breeding to occur.  However, with dogs this error rate is greatly reduced due to the canine’s amazing sense of smell and rigorous training.  Once a pest is detected, the company verifies the findings and provides a confidential report to the owner.  You may also be able to employ them directly for the discreet eradication of the pests as well, saving you time and money.

Bed Bug Detection for Hotels

With the growing concern and public awareness of bed bugs being found in hotel rooms, many people are looking even closer now for the tiny pests. What many people don’t know is that the presence of bed bugs is not the result of a dirty environment.  Bed bugs can infest any area because they travel on luggage and clothes.  This is why they have become such a problem for hotel owners.  Thousands of people will stay at your hotel each year coming from different areas of the state, country, or globe.  If a few bed bugs travel on their luggage, they can detach themselves into your rooms and begin breeding an infestation.  This means that even if you maintain the highest cleaning standards in your hotel, you could still have a bed bug problem.

In order to avoid this situation, proactive treatment can ensure the first signs of bed bugs are removed from your property before an infestation occurs.  This is done by checking the problem areas of your hotel rooms on a regular basis.  As mentioned above, scent dogs trained specifically for the presence of bed bugs and their eggs are also often used in order to discreetly and accurately search the premises.  You may perform full sweeps of your hotel or schedule specific times and dates for rooms to keep curiosity out of your patrons.

Pests invading your restaurant or hotel can lead to a PR nightmare.  Rather than wait until it is too late, use proactive treatments to ensure your pest problem is taken care of before an infestation occurs.  There are a variety of proactive treatments you can employ, but hiring a bed bug pest control company is your safest bet to ensure a discreet and accurate pest detection.

About the Author:
Daniel Mackie, owner of GreenLeaf Pest Control, is a Toronto pest control expert well-known as an industry go-to guy, an innovator of safe, effective pest control solutions, and is a regular guest on HGTV. Mackie, along with business partner Sandy Costa, were the first pest control professionals in Canada to use detection dogs and thermal remediation for the successful eradication of bed bugs. In his free time, he is an avid gardener.