Let me start by saying that Turks and Caicos is incredible and is our new favorite place to travel to! We stayed at the Ports of Call resort and had a rough experience. The positives are the staff was super friendly, and the location was perfect.
Unfortunately, we started noticing bug bites after waking up in the morning, and by the 3rd morning had around 40-45 bug bites and got concerned about bed bugs. I pulled off the sheets/mattress cover and found a live red bug, and a blood spot where a bed bug was likely smashed. All of my bites were consistent with bed bugs, with 1-3 bites in a line in multiple places.
We notified the front desk and they moved us to a new room in a separate building later that night. After we moved to the new room, I never received another bug bite for the last 2 nights of our stay. We elevated this to management and they were apologetic, gave us an 81 dollar credit for the $40 in laundry they had charged us and incidentals, and promised to look into it.
For the last several weeks the management were difficult to work with. They allowed our previous room to be booked after us, and 5 days after we had the incident, they had Orkin come out and do an inspection. They provided a report from Orkin that they found no bed bugs. Interestingly, that report mentioned that “It is therefore possible that bedbug activity exists though not discernible at the time of inspection.”
Management continued to discount our story even though we provided all this data and a picture of the live bug. They claimed it was a beetle, and that all of my bites were from no-see-ums.
I contacted a local company who deals with bed bugs and explained our experience. They agreed that all these facts indicated bed bugs and even noted that a beetle would be very unlikely to be found under the sheets on a mattress.
Unfortunately, it made our trip very stressful, and we had to purchase treatment kits for our clothes/luggage.
The way management handled this was very disappointing. I imagine they will respond to this review and claim there were no bugs based on Orkin’s report and that they were just no-see-um bites. This doesn’t line up based on how the bites stopped when we moved rooms. No-see-ums also don’t bite in a line, they bite in clusters. They continued to deny any possibility of bed bugs and that we were clearly wrong. I’ll let you decide based on the information provided, but for us, we will not stay there again.