(Warning for some strong images in this post)

Cimex - Bed bug

This summer me and my fiance went to Corsica, on a fantastic roadtrip on two wheels.

The weather, locations, food and the people we met were all fantastic, with one major exception: Hotel “U Listincu”.

We chose this hotel not because of the discrete description in our Lonely Planet guide book but simply because it was the only one with a room free during the high season.

After the first night I woke up having some bites, which I supposed were from mosquitos. The second morning the same thing, and the bites started to become very big and very itching.

On the third night, I felt something moving in the neck while in bed falling asleep, so I grabbed it and turned on the lights. To my fear it was a Cimex, a “Bedbugs (or bed bugs) are small, elusive, and parasitic insects of the family Cimicidae that live strictly by feeding on the blood of humans and other warm-blooded animals.” (wikipedia).

We found some more of these parasites in the bed and went to the reception, which of course was closed. We woke up the manager and were told that “People had to sleep during these hours”, but he unwillingly followed us to the room to check it out. Since we had left the lights on the parasites now had disappeared, and the manager told us that if there were some insects probably we had brought them with us from the beach. He then went to bed.

What we had to do was to put the bed on the balcony, and to sleep on the floor until the next day, when we could show him the photos of the underside of the bed, and we were promised another room later in the day, which we were.

Our old room should be “disinfected” they told us, which we found out meant cleaning it and spraying it with Raid, insect spray, making it ready for the next arriving guests.

On our leave we were not left any kind of discount on the price neither were we compensated in any way, except being offered coffee for free one morning.

The bites were cortisone treated for about 10 days, effectively making the vacation less pleasureful, and I wasn’t fully cured until after over a month. I can honestly say, that the bites of the Cimex are some of the most painful, itching and irritating ones I’ve ever had.

We have been travelling a lot, and I’ve even been to India which is the only place where I have encountered Cimex before, but just in one location of perhaps 50 visited. There, when going to the reception, I was immediately offered a new room, with discount, while the manager apologized for the problem and the bell bolls of the simple hotel in Bangalore carried my bags and my things over to the new room in another part of the building. Service. And that hotel costed less than a tenth of what Hotel U Listincu costed.

My advice to anyone reading this is: avoid “Hotel U Listincu” and it’s management.