Woman wakes up to find bed 'crawling with bugs' at London hotel
North News & Pictures
A woman has described her horror after waking up in the early hours of the morning to find her bed covered in bugs at a Travelodge in London.
Debra Bratt, from Hartlepool, likened the experience to taking part in an I'm A Celebrity-style Bushtucker Trial.
She had been visiting her younger sister Sharon Abbey, in London, with her two other sisters, Sue Cook and Julie Porritt, on 11 November, when their journey back to Hartlepool hit problems, and Sue felt under the weather.
They decided to book a room at the London Central Kings Cross Royal Scot Hotel, where Debra woke in the night to discover insects of all different sizes crawling everywhere over all three beds.
Debra told the Hartlepool Mail: "I woke up and put the light on and all three beds were covered.
"I woke Julie up straight away but I didn't want to wake Sue up because she really hadn't been very well at all and she needed her sleep.
"I was just trying to get all of the bugs off the beds but there were so many of them."
Debra went to the hotel reception at 7am with a tissue full of the insects she found in her room.
"I didn't want to cause a scene but I explained the situation to them," she said.
"The woman on reception asked me why I didn't come and tell them straight away but I explained that my sister had been really ill and I didn't want to disturb her, and I had some of the bugs in the tissue to show them."
Travelodge agreed to refund the sisters for the room but, just days later, Debra broke out dozens of bites all over her body.
She visited One Life Hartlepool on Sunday night and was told the bites were infected, and is now on a course of antibiotics.
"It was just an absolute nightmare," she said. "To think that they had been crawling around us while we were asleep is absolutely awful and now I'm covered in these bites.
"We had been watching I'm a Celebrity earlier in the night and when I woke up I felt like I was in a Bushtucker Trial."
Debra since received a letter from the Travelodge customer service team confirming that the room was found to be infested with bed bugs after an investigation, and that the room had since been treated by a pest control company.
A Travelodge spokeswoman said: "We are doing everything we can to help the customer and we hope to be able to work with her to get an outcome she is happy with."
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