Bed bugs are no longer limited to hotel rooms – the biting bugs have now made their way on to commercial flights. One British Airways passenger got such a nasty case of bug bites, that she had to go through a very intensive detox to kill all the bugs on her clothes.
After failing to get an apology from British Airways, she took to the Internet and created ba-bites.com to bring some public attention to BA’s total lack of interest in their inflight bug problem.
The site gets attention the best possible way – with graphic photos of her bites. One example of her bites is seen above – the rest of the photos can be found here.
Once the site went up, the media got involved, and finally got a reply from British Airways, offering a very weak apology a compensation offer.
I’m torn on the whole issue – we know bed bugs travel with people in their clothes and their luggage, and no amount of pesticides will completely get rid of them. It only takes one passenger carrying bed bugs from a hotel to pass them on to the next passenger in that seat. The only solution would be spraying chemicals after every single flight, which would probably create a very nasty environment in the plane.
The bigger issue here is a total breakdown of customer service by British Airways. To read the entire story and hear how other airlines dealt with this issue, head on over to ba-bites.com.