Things You Should Know About Bedbugs & How it Affects a Business

Hotels are one of the most common places where bed bugs will be found. Bed bugs can cause serious damage and contamination, and they're notoriously difficult to get rid of. Watch this video to learn how you can protect yourself from bed bug infestations while staying safe in hotels.

Pests can cause several problems in the workplace, from distracting employees to contaminating food products with bacteria. Learn more about how pest control protects your business and what you should be looking for when selecting an exterminator.

Valpas has created what appears to be the world's first connected bed bug prevention system that both improves the bottom line and the guest experience. And while technology is at the core of the product, the startup matches biological science with the IoT to build an affordable and reliable system to eliminate an expensive and stressful headache for hoteliers: bed bug infestations.

Valpas also has an interesting origin story. It developed as an off-shoot of an existing bed bug eradication service. The founders found the need for a hotel-specific system that not only eliminates the ghastly cost of eliminating bed bugs but also guarantees guests a bed-bug-free stay.

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Things You Should Know About Bed Bugs & How It Affects A Business

Perhaps, because of the frequent turnovers, there's a big [00:00:32] in hospitality than it is in multifamily. Not to scare some of our readers, more and more people are renting these days. If there's a resident in the unit and they have a bedbug problem, can that bedbug spread throughout the apartments? Can they spread from room to room?

They normally do through the structures of the buildings.

I thought they are lazy and will stay in bed. Are you telling me that if you have a 100-unit building and one of these residents has a bedbug problem, it can spread to the whole building?

Once they nest, they start reproducing. Once there's a large enough number of bedbugs, around 20 to 30 new bedbugs that are born, it's getting cramped in that nest as it would get crammed if you would fit twenty people in a hotel room. You start venturing out. That's how they then start spreading from room to room.

They can colonize an entire building.

It's quite difficult that it gets into a whole floor, at worst into the whole hotel. It needs to be completely refurbished and torn down the walls.

Is it too late at that point?

Yes, exactly.

Would any solution work? You don't want to use insecticide on every corner of your room like a heat treatment or anything like that?

Once it gets bad, you need to get rid of all the materials. In a regular bedbug infestation where there's one nest in the room, hotels need to throw everything out of the room, causing that huge excess waste of furniture. If it's a bad case, you need to start getting into the walls, too.

That means you could be buying secondhand furniture on Craigslist and unbeknownst to you, you may be narrating an infestation of bedbugs coming.

It could be. That's also pretty difficult too. Normally, if it's a professional company, let's say a professional living provider like a hospitality company, the infested materials are thrown out in a way that they don't get into Craigslist. That happens a lot from one consumer to another though.

This is something to bear in mind for people that like to travel. What's the best practice? You travel a lot. It's unavoidable. Whether you stay in a hostel or a five-star luxury resort, bedbugs do exist. Would think you see more of them in lower-end hospitality groups, is that true?

That's a fallacy, too. There's this narrative that's created around bedbugs that it's a problem of lack of hygiene and lack of cleanliness, but it has nothing to do with the social-economical status of the traveler or the hotel.

It's like COVID, it doesn't discriminate.

Coming back to the analogy, they spread like a virus. Up until now, there hasn't been a vaccine. To answer your question, thankfully now, the best thing that travelers can do is look for the Valpas label on hotel sites or consult our website, ValpasHotels.com, where we list all the safe hotels that carry our standard, where you can visit and return back home safe.

You don't want a vaccine. Having a vaccine would mean you're immune, which probably would mean they fest on you all day long unless you want to inject particles in your bloodstream, a deterrence. That means there's an insecticide in your bloodstream. There is no real solution. It seems like you're well-positioned to deal with this.

Before we talk about your solution in more depth and running a company if you're traveling and you arrive at your home after travel, what should you do with your luggage? What should you do with your clothes? Should you leave everything outside? How should you make sure you don't bring the infestation into your home? I'm asking you this because I'm about to travel throughout Europe. These are good words to follow.

There's this narrative created around bed bugs that it's a problem of lack of hygiene and cleanliness. It has nothing to do with the traveler's or the hotel's social or economic status.

When you arrived at the hotel room and before accepting the room, check it. You can consult our blog. There is a guide to do a proper bedbug check inside the room and try to see for marks of bed bugs in the bed and the vicinity of the bed. After you get back home, before placing anything into your room, put all your belongings into 60 degrees washing machine program and then inspect visually luggage with a light bulb or flashlight and look for bedbugs. This is the old way of dealing with and trying to avoid bedbugs when you travel.

Store your luggage away from your bed, room, or any place where people can visit. Is that going to help?

Yes. Certainly, don't leave your luggage, especially not under the bed.

It’s a common thing to leave your luggage under the bed. How short of a journey for those lazy bedbugs as you emit carbon dioxide. Like many insects attracted to carbon dioxide, all the bedbug has to do is go straight up, bite, and multiply. They can infest your luggage and also your bed itself. It's a scary situation there.

Talk to us about running a hardware company here, too. You're building an interesting company. I coined this phrase when we spoke once, "Extermination as a service in some ways." You are not necessarily relying on exterminators to come to you. Your device can function and do what an exterminator can do, but it's real-time in your room, hotel room, or apartment. It's constantly detecting and alerting you to the state of things so that you can replace an entire industry.

Valpas is introducing the bedbug safety standard for the hospitality industry. You never know when you have bedbugs, when you get them, and how you need to always deal with them as they occur. You experienced losses, reputational, and financial ones. Valpas makes all that go away and makes all existing solutions obsolete by being the full solution for hospitality providers while working preventively.

Bedbugs never become a problem because the Valpas standard collects and eliminates any bedbugs on behalf of guests and stops them from becoming a problem to the hotel or the guest back at home. In fact, we, at Valpas, empower hotels to solve this issue on behalf of guests. With that, enabled the safest stay there is now across hotels and the whole industry.

Many of our readers work in real estate. They may hold various functions and have an idea to disrupt because they've seen a problem firsthand. They have an idea to disrupt a process and create a company. You came from the same problem. You ran an extermination company effectively. You pioneered a heat treatment, became one of the largest players in Finland, and had a nice exit after you sold your service-based company. You created a startup. When you went through the process of creating, did you do any customer validation? Did you feel like you knew the problem first-hand and that you could get straight down to the product?

There was a ton of customer validation and discovery. In fact, there still is. It's an ongoing process. In my view, one of the most important functions for a startup founder is that constant discovery.

I want to pause and double-highlight this. There is no excuse not to do any customer validation. Even if you are an expert and you experienced the problem in your industry, far too many people in PropTech see themselves as experts, go, and build a solution that they think they need. It's too egotistical and risky to also be Steve Jobs. Frankly, it's like a bedbug. You're being lazy. It's hard work to go and talk to customers, especially when you feel like you already know the problem. It's dangerous if you think you know the problem, go, and build. Do you want to expand on that point?

Steve Jobs is a great example of a person who did constant discovery and validation. He didn't believe in asking customers what they want or need because customers don't know that. That I absolutely agree. The discovery and that validation are more about asking the right questions in the right format and then connecting all that information into some key insight, validating those insights with early versions of your product like prototypes, and then building it after that.

One of the key things that I've learned as a founder in our whole team is that when you speak about a product, it does not equal technology. Product equals tech plus positioning. Many companies get tech rights. Especially coming from Finland, we're pretty well-known for our tech-savviness. Linux, Nokia, all these huge important companies and software came from Finland. We're highly savvy in tech and we know how to build great tech.

The Finish bias is to not focus at all on the positioning. Positioning is how you are perceived and how your customers see you. How does the whole market see you? How does the general public see you? Developing that because that is equally important as the tech. This is something that, at the beginning as a first-time startup founder, you did not completely realize. That is one of the crucial lessons in any start-up. No matter if you're a PropTech or something else, you should keep that in mind.

For us, as an example, what we understood eventually was that we were seeing that this is a topic that is not discussed because it has a negative stigma. Bed bugs are a sensitive topic because they come to you during the night. They attack and violate you and there is no good solution to it. Hospitality was hush-hush about this whole topic when we were starting to develop Valpas and for good reason. There was no good solution and it's a sensitive issue. It's the biggest service failure it can have as a hotel.

At the same time, we saw that this is a huge topic for travelers, too. For travelers, this is the number one feared, hygiene and health issue. When we travel, we're vulnerable to a number of health and hygiene issues, but bedbug is the most feared one. What we realized is that while hotels are wary of it, travelers are afraid. That's the real question.

We saw that there were already sites online where travelers could report hotels with bed bug problems so that they could avoid those hotels. We also saw that a growing number of travelers scan for the hotel's online reputation. If there is a mention of a bedbug review, they would go to another hotel and book with another hotel. This is the reason. We understood that travelers are afraid of this. We concluded that because there's this fundamental need, we humans have to feel safe.

Together with that, we concluded that if there would be a good enough solution that would keep travelers safe and people from being attacked and bringing back bed bugs to their homes, this would be something that people would like to know. It needs to be positioned in the right way. Because of this insight, while the whole industry and the whole market were sensitive toward the topic, we made the call of making Valpas a guest-facing standard.

Instead of reporting the hotels that have problems, you can see those great hotels that are safe from it, where you can not just stay safe but return back home safe, too. It's because of that our value proposition is extremely strong. We not only avoid hotels or losses related to bedbugs. We enable a slight revenue increase thanks to Valpas' distribution channels and online labels that increased slightly the number of guests who want to stay and book eventually with the hotel. It's because of this, that even several months into the pandemic, we still have 0% client churn. We have over 60 highly-rated hotels as clients. We're seeing these early signs of a new must-have hygiene standard for the industry. This is a story of how important discovery and validation were for the product.

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Creating the World's First Co-Living Start-Up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2MQNZnfvOA

Innovative Housing that can change the world!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K92fRT04Qjo

Building an Online E-Commerce Furniture Empire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhznBbYMhhg

About Zain Jaffer

Zain Jaffer is an accomplished executive, investor, and entrepreneur. He started his first company at the age of 14 and later moved to the US as an immigrant to found Vungle, after securing $25M from tech giants including Google & AOL in 2011. Vungle recently sold for $780m.

His achievements have garnered international recognition and acclaim; he is the recipient of prestigious awards such as “Forbes 30 Under 30”, “Inc. Magazine’s 35 Under 35” and the “SF Business Times Tech & Innovation Award”. He is regularly featured in major business & tech publications such as The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch.