Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 18th April 2024 Issue no. 1110
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Spotta puts bed bugs to the test
In its first year of operation, Spotta's Bed Pods have reduced the amount of bed bug incidents discovered by hotel guests from 50% to just 3.3% 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% 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% 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% 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."
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 occurences of missed identification.
"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," adds Robert/
Spotta announced in July 2020 it had received £934,000 in seed funding to expand the Bed Pod into new markets including the USA, as well as develop further products such as the Forest Pod, currently in advanced field trials.
5th November 2020