The dark specks of blood on her pillow were the gruesome giveaway. Hannah Stephenson had woken up at a Travelodge in Cambridge with itchy arms – and when she saw red trails across the hotel bedding, ‘I realised suddenly what it was’.

She pulled back the sheets to find bedbugs crawling across them. ‘I was just like: “Oh my God.” I was freaking out,’ she remembers.

The bites, which started out as a few red lumps on her arms, got progressively worse. ‘As the day went on, they got more and more red, swollen, inflamed,’ says Hannah, 31, a travel content creator. ‘They appeared on my face and other parts of my body too.’

Within a few days, she had more than 100 red welts across her face, arms, legs and torso, was unbearably itchy and self-conscious. ‘They were so gross, they were disgusting,’ she says. ‘I was horrified.’

Hannah’s case comes as experts report a huge rise in infestations of the famously resilient insects – what some are calling ‘peak bedbug’.

Pest control company Rentokil says that confirmed bedbug activity in the UK increased by 44 per cent year on year between 2023 and 2025, while JG Pest Control says it has made more than 5,000 bedbug-related visits over the past 12 months.

Recent outbreaks have plagued hotels, trains and planes. Last week six Southeastern services were cancelled after suspected bedbugs on trains between Kent and London. This follows two incidents last month of bedbugs being found in the drivers’ cabs of the same train operator.

And there have also been allegations on social media of bedbug sightings at other Travelodge hotels, at Premier Inn locations and other hotels in London. ‘This year does seem particularly bad,’ says Professor James Logan, Honorary Professor of Medical Entomology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

‘Bedbugs are increasing globally and that’s partly due to the fact that they’re becoming resistant to insecticides, the toxic chemicals we normally use to kill them.’

A report in the Journal of Pest Science last month concluded that bedbugs carry different genetic signatures depending on where they’re from, allowing them not only to survive our efforts to eradicate them but to evolve and strengthen their resistance.

Their spread is also down to the fact we travel more. Bedbugs ‘hitchhike’, which means they cling to clothing and bags, Professor Logan explains. Hotels are hotbeds because of their large, transient population. The same is true of trains, planes and hospitals. A Qantas flight was grounded in Rome earlier this month after the creatures were spotted scuttling around in economy.

‘But what we’re starting to see now is bedbugs also in places like offices, workplaces and pubs,’ says Professor Logan.

An infestation at The Guardian newspaper, reported last month, has resulted in staff being allowed to work remotely and given home bedbug ‘monitors’ – gadgets which lure bugs out of their hiding places with special chemical attractants. In other offices in London, staff have refused to come in when colleagues have revealed they have infestations at home. Rising temperatures may also be to blame. ‘Climate change is making it better for them and worse for us,’ Professor Logan says.

Put simply, when the weather is warmer, bedbugs breed faster. ‘We’re looking at a future where we have more insects that will try to share our homes and that includes bedbugs.’

The creatures are nocturnal and attracted to the carbon dioxide we exhale. Their feeding is highly efficient and a marvel of nature: before drawing blood through its straw-like proboscis, the parasite first pumps in saliva containing biochemicals that numb the area so you don’t feel the bite. It’s this saliva – which also thins the blood to keep it flowing for the three to ten minutes a bug needs to drink its fill – that causes the itchy immune reaction.

Since welts may not emerge for up to a week, the bugs can establish a thriving community before anyone knows they’re there.

‘It’s usually four or five weeks before people realise they have a bedbug infestation, by which point they will have laid eggs and hatched out, and there might be hundreds,’ says Professor Logan. Since the tiny irritants need to be near their source of food – us – they hide in places where we spend time sitting or lying: bedding, mattresses, headboards, even the seams of your pyjamas. Once on clothes ‘you can spread them around pretty quickly’.

When Hannah realised what had bitten her, she complained to the Cambridge Travelodge hotel reception – but says she was shown little sympathy and merely told to fill out an online complaint form. Rushing home – she just wanted ‘to get out of there’ – she ‘had to strip off in the shed and hot wash everything that could go in the washing machine’.

The possessions that couldn’t, such as her sunglasses case, notebook and backpack, went into the freezer for ‘a month’.

The NHS suggests a hot wash of 60C for affected items, followed by tumble drying on a hot setting for at least half an hour. Items that can’t be washed should be put in a plastic bag and frozen for up to three weeks.

Cleaning wasn’t enough to spare Hannah the ‘ordeal’ of other people’s reactions, however. When she saw people staring at her bitten face and arms, she knew they were horrified. ‘I worried that people would think I was dirty or maybe contagious, because just from looking at me, you might not know what it was,’ she says.

She cancelled social plans and bought a last-minute long-sleeved dress for her cousin’s wedding, even though it was a heatwave, along with heavy make-up to try to disguise the bumps.

After waiting a week for a response from Travelodge, Hannah decided to take matters into her own hands. ‘I felt really frustrated and I was so uncomfortable and itchy and miserable that I was like, right, I’m taking this to TikTok now.’

Once she’d posted her account of what had happened, a number of other users commented to say they too had experienced bedbug bites in hotels. ‘I was really surprised at how common it seems to be.’

Hannah then heard back from Travelodge, which operates more than 600 hotels in the UK, and offered her £2,000 compensation.

A spokesman for Travelodge said: ‘The health, safety and comfort of our customers is our priority and we maintain stringent, expert-led measures to prevent and manage pest issues, including training our housekeeping colleagues to be vigilant and to spot early signs wherever possible.’

Hannah’s experience has made her view hotel stays very differently. On a recent trip away, she ‘stripped off the sheets and checked all the crevices of the mattress really closely’.

Hannah Shade, 30, also feels frustrated that her concerns weren’t taken seriously. In August, she stayed at Travelodge Monks Cross, York, on a family trip for her daughter’s tenth birthday.

‘I was bitten quite badly. I woke up after my first night with some bites but after the second night I had around 15 to 20 extremely itchy bites across my arm, hand, palm and fingers. Some were very swollen,’ she says.

She complained and was later told the room had been taken out of service.

The hotel then arranged a third-party pest inspection ‘which reportedly found no pests, but the report they sent me had significant information blurred out. They also confirmed the pest inspection hadn’t assessed the dark, mould-like residue I’d noticed on the mattress protector.’

A spokesman for the hotel said: ‘In the rare instance that an issue is reported in one of our hotels, we immediately take affected and surrounding rooms out of service for inspection and treatment by independent pest control experts.’

Following her stay, Ms Shade meticulously cleaned everything. ‘I had to isolate all our belongings outside when we got home and take precautions with our clothes and my daughter’s birthday presents because I was worried about potentially bringing bedbugs into our house. It ruined the trip,’ she says.

We urge children to sleep tight and not let the bedbugs bite for good reason. Along with redness and itching, bedbug saliva can trigger anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction), while scratching can lead to a wound that then becomes infected. ‘It also has a mental health impact as well, because when people have bedbugs, they become extremely paranoid,’ Professor Logan explains. ‘Even after the infestation is gone, some people become delusional, because the thought of creatures crawling around in your bed, which is a very private space, can make people feel they’re still there when they’re not.’

‘A lot of times I get called out to do an inspection because people think they’ve been bitten in a hotel and have brought something home,’ says pest controller Sarah Spratt, who calls herself the Bed Bug Queen. ‘Usually it is nothing and we have to help the customer calm down.’

Still, she admits that ‘this year’s the busiest I’ve seen it in the last decade. This summer seemed particularly busy for bedbugs and particularly busy for the more complicated cases.’ These include infestations in the homes of hoarders.

While hot washes or freezing can get rid of the insects from individual items of clothing, she says, pest controllers are always required in cases of infestation. The bugs are extraordinary escape artists and can spread between flats in apartment blocks or hotel rooms that share a wall.

Typical treatments involve hot steam (killing adult bedbugs requires temperatures of 48.3C, according to Rentokil, while eggs can only be blasted at 54.8C), or insecticides, which often require affected rooms to be temporarily out of bounds. Ms Spratt uses a desiccant dust called ChinChex, which means closing off treated rooms for an hour.

Her average price is around £500 for one session, which is all that’s needed to tackle the issue. It may seem steep but tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of damage can be done if the critters are not eradicated: the stain of the bugs’ own blood and their faeces can ruin furniture, wallpaper and carpets, while a severe infestation can produce a musty odour that requires a complete refit.

Professor Logan says that at one hotel he visited, £40,000 of repairs were required to fix bedbug damage in just one room. ‘They are a zero-tolerance pest – you cannot live with bedbugs,’ he says. ‘You to get rid of them.’

Hannah Stephenson’s skin took a month to return to normal after the insects ruined her summer and she says she now has her own method of prevention: ‘I definitely won’t stay in a Travelodge again.’