Woman feasted on by hotel bed bugs

A WOMAN was left with 30 bites on her body after staying in a Henley hotel room infested with bed bugs.

Sharon Aggarwal, 53, locked herself in the bathroom for two hours after being woken up “scratching and itching” at 3am in a guest room at The Catherine Wheel on Tuesday last week.

Mrs Aggarwal, an IT worker from the Midlands, often travels to Henley for work and frequently stays at the hotel in Hart Street.

She said: “I woke up at about 3am scratching and itching. I pulled back the covers and I could see something moving in the sheets.

“I could see about four or five. There were small bugs on the sheets and a bigger one on the pillow.

“There were bites on my neck and my arm. It sounds gross but I squashed one and blood popped out, so I knew it had been biting me.

“I went and hid in the bathroom until about 5am, got myself ready and left.

“At that time in the morning I couldn’t really go anywhere, so I was up for two hours, Googling bed bugs and doing my research and trying to see what I could do with the bites.

“I trapped a bigger one under a glass and left it on top of the bed so that the hotel staff would see it in the morning.”

Mrs Aggarwal said that the itching persisted for days, starting to subside on Monday after purchasing antihistamines from a chemist.

She said: “Since then, when I counted, I had more than 30 bites on my body. It feels like 10 times worse than a mosquito bite in terms of itchiness, it’s just awful.

“I had two bites on my face right next to my eye and I had them on my neck. It made me want to hide away because I’ve got big, red welts all over my face.

“Some of them started immediately itching when I woke up, like the ones on my hands. Then there are three in a line on my stomach, which came up straight away as well.

“I have bites wherever the skin was exposed, so above my waistband and around my back – there are quite a few there.

“The itching has been continuous, so I had to go and get some strong antihistamines from the pharmacy when I went to show them. To think it was on my face, it’s just gross. The ones on my hands are still itching, I have to concentrate to not scratch them.”

Mrs Aggarwal said that she notified the night porter as she left on the Wednesday morning, as well as leaving a hand-written note at reception asking for someone to contact her. She contacted Wetherspoons directly that day and informed South Oxfordshire District Council’s environmental health team on Thursday last week.

A spokesman for Wetherspoons said that it had confirmed the presence of bed bugs in the room, which was “immediately taken out of use”.

He said that two nearby rooms were also taken out of use for monitoring. The spokesman said: “We were informed by a guest staying in the hotel on May 6 of the suspected presence of bed bugs in her room.

“This was confirmed after her departure and the room was immediately taken out of use. We are liaising directly with the guest concerned to address her concerns. Like all hotel operators, Wetherspoons has procedures in place to minimise this problem. These include daily checks by trained staff when servicing hotel rooms and regular preventative visits by qualified contracts, which means episodes such as this are rare.”

Wetherspoons has apologised to Mrs Aggarwal and offered a reimbursement for her stay last week and a rate agreement on future stays.

The district council confirmed it had received a complaint and was investigating in line with its standard procedure.

Tom Frost, owner of Pure Pest Solutions in Wallingford, said that bed bug infestations have been steadily on the rise.

He said that in the year 2023-24 his business saw a 22 per cent increase in heat treatments for the pests.

Mr Frost said that if a hotel room has an infestation of bed bugs that it was most likely brought in by another guest. He said: “Often, the way it comes into the property would be a customer has brought it in at some point — they’ve brought it in on their bags or similar then they’ve put the bag on the bed and the bed bugs have made a run for it.

“The hotels are pretty innocent in that because they can’t help if someone brings something in like bed bugs – it’s about acting when these things happen. It can spread between rooms but hotel linen is usually hot washed so it should stop the issue from spreading. Invariably it is about treating the room with the infestation.

“If you have bed bugs, the room needs to be closed off, and a heat treatment needs to be done.

“The heat treatment raises the temperature of the room to between 50 and 70 degrees and it cooks all of the bugs in one. Then you steam the area and you might apply a residual spray as well. With those things it should treat the infestation.”