Unhappy Guests Claim Bahamas Resort Infested With Bed Bugs

Image courtesy of James St. John

Regardless of how much time you spend outside in the sun, sand, and surf when you’re on vacation, you still want to be able to end your day in a bed that is nice and clean. Yet some guests at a popular Bahamas resort say they were attacked by a colony of bed bugs living in their hotel room.

A Miami woman and her husband are seeking more than $15,000 in damages for emotional distress after they claim their room at the Atlantis Paradise Island Resort was infested with bed bugs. She says she woke up completely covered in bites.

“I really have never been in such pain in my life. I mean, these things are just swelling up all over my body,” she says in a video shot a few days after she returned from the trip, reports CBS Miami. In the video, she’s covered in numerous large, red, swollen bites.

She says that when the pulled the mattress cover off the bed, they found a swarm of the black bugs on her side of the bed, and took a cell phone video to capture the moment.

“It was like something out of a horror movie. We saw hundreds of bugs running around, and also their excrement all over the bed skirt,” she told CBS Miami. She says hotel management didn’t seem too worried about how she was feeling.

She says she used prescription medications for almost a week but they didn’t provide any relief. Her doctor, she claims, told her she suffered the most severe bed bug attack he had ever seen.

Her attorney also says it’s the worst case he’s ever handled.

“When you check into a hotel, the Atlantis hotel that is really a five-star hotel, that comes with expectations, one of which is the sheets are going to be clean and you’re not going to be eaten alive by bedbugs,” she said.

The resort said in a statement that it has “very strict standards of hotel hygiene and cleanliness.”

“In the unusual event we are made aware of a concern, we respond immediately to the situation and take the appropriate steps to remediate the problem as we did with [the plaintiff],” the resort said.

When she reported a concern of bed bugs in her room, the staff “immediately took the room out of service, brought in the property’s professional pest company to eradicate the problem and provided compensation for her stay,” the resort said, adding that it had no prior complaints regarding that room of bed bugs and hasn’t had any since her stay a year ago.

The resort says it offered to reimburse her for any medical bills resulting from the experience, but that she declined.

“We have engaged with [the plaintiff] directly and then her multiple prior attorneys continually over the year since this incident took place in an effort to resolve this matter,” the resort says. “We regret that she has decided to take this course of action in a further effort to extract a large financial reward.”

The woman says she just wants to make sure others don’t find themselves in the kind of pain she suffered.

“Take notice of this, and take preventive measures to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” she said.

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