CAMBRIDGE, U.K.—In its first year of operation, Spotta’s Bed Pods have reduced the amount of bed bug incidents discovered by hotel guests from 50 percent to just 3.3 percent in its customers’ properties.
The “always-on” monitoring service uses AI-driven recognition technology to identify insects and provide real time alerts. The Bed Pod enables hotels, other accommodation providers and their pest control partners to identify occurrences of bed bugs and treat the problem early, limiting the damage pests cause.
Following its first year of real-world deployment in customer hotels—servicing over 91,000 room nights—52.2 percent of detections made by Spotta were in rooms with no recent history of bed bugs, demonstrating the system’s effectiveness as an early warning against new infestations. Repeat detections in rooms helped hoteliers assess whether extermination treatments were successful or needed further, deeper treatment.
Across the 12-month period, Spotta was the first to identify bed bugs in 94.2 percent of cases, significantly reducing the number of guest encounters with bed bugs in multi-room properties.
“For accommodation providers, most of the overall financial impact of bed bugs comes from contact between the guest and pests, which leads to complaints, bad reviews and loss of revenue,” says Robert Fryers, Co-founder and CEO of Spotta. “Defining success for the Bed Pod has always been, ‘Does it alert the owner/operator to the presence of bed bugs before a guest discovers them?’. Our customers had previously experienced a 50 percent success rate at best in detection through their existing monitoring methods—meaning one in two bed bug incidents were first reported by guests. With Spotta, we’ve been able to reduce this to just 3.3% being found by guests.”
Bed Bugs Hard to Distinguish
Traditional monitoring methods include sniffer dogs, pre-scheduled visits from professional pest controllers/inspectors, and training housekeeping staff to conduct manual inspections. With bed bugs growing to a maximum of just 5mm in length, they are hard to distinguish with the naked eye resulting in understandable occurrences of missed identification.
During the Bed Pod’s first year, 94.2 percent of cases were successfully detected by Spotta, with guests reporting bed bugs accounting for just 3.3 percent of cases and housekeeping identifying the remaining 2.5 percent.
Fryers continued: “The first year results of Bed Pod show we have a credible, proven solution with real-world efficacy. This represents a meaningful step forward for pest controllers and hoteliers, helping them proactively monitor for bed bugs.”
Spotta announced in July 2020 it had received $1.2 million in seed funding to expand the Bed Pod into new markets including the United States, as well as develop further products such as the Forest Pod, currently in advanced field trials. Find out more at spotta.co.
