Passengers Say Turkish Airlines Flights Have Unwelcome Guests: Bedbugs | Hacker News Reader

Passengers Say Turkish Airlines Flights Have Unwelcome Guests: Bedbugs

nytimes.com

98 pointswhack62 comments

We took a Turkish Airlines flight in September (IST-SFO), and the seats were teeming with bedbugs (as in, multiple passengers were able to visually point them out when we were still boarding).

Some passengers were able to switch to other seats, while multiple others broke out in hives (including my wife). The cabin staff were polite and understanding, but once we landed, escalating to Turkish airlines was pretty useless. We've filed a case with the DOT which got the airline to respond.

Glad the media is covering this, we heard from multiple folks that this has been a problem.

Wow, did you consider requesting to deplane? I would at least seriously consider it, considering the notoriously difficult to get rid of nature of bed bugs.

Can you share the date and the flight number? It would be great to map which aircraft had bedbugs.

We took TK 79 on Oct 5 2024.

Also, my search brought up this final response from Turkish, which infuriated me enough that I wanted to share:

"Thank you for your feedback.

At Turkish Airlines, we strive to provide all our passengers with the best flying experience possible and to make them feel valued at every stage of their journey. As giving our passengers who choose us on their travels the service they deserve and delivering this excellently are among our priority targets, we again have experienced how important your feedback is.

Through your feedback, we’re able to improve the services we provide. We’d like to thank you again for your support.

We kindly submit for your information and wish to host you better in your future travels.

If you ever have your home infested with bed bugs, their eradication is simple. You need to have a bedframe with countable legs, a bug-proof plastic mattress cover, and a bag of diatomaceous earth. You simply zip the cover over your mattress, and put a 1cm layer of diatomaceous earth around the feet of your bedframe. The bed bugs naturally come out to feed on you at night, then find burrows to hide in during the day. Normally they'd hide in the crooks of your mattress, but we've already prevented this. They are forced to walk down your bedframe, and over the layer of diatomaceous earth, which causes fatal ruptures in their carapace. Bed bugs can only live about a month without feeding, and you should expect any small to medium sized infestation to resolve in this timeframe, certainly any infestation which might arise from picking up a few bed bugs from traveling.

This sounds like a very good solution but how about eggs? I would imagine that those can survive longer than a month. IIRC I once heard that the eggs would be usually on the underside of your mattress, so you should keep the plastic cover on until after the eggs have hatched and the bugs died. Is that correct?

Bed bugs can go up to 1 year without feeding. If you got something that fundamental wrong how can I trust the rest of it?

I'm very confused, if the bed bugs are in/on the mattress, and you enclose the mattress in a cover, how do the bed bugs get out of the cover?

They don't. You leave the cover on until you are sure you got them all and then you throw away the mattress and get a new one.

Also wash everything you own in hot and dry on hot. Or put it in an airtight box for at least a year. They can and will live anywhere within a few feet of where you spend a lot of your time. Couches, beds, chairs, carpets, etc.

This person is downplaying how hard it can be to get rid of them.

Hotels get bed bugs all the time, and they don’t regularly throw away mattresses and furniture. Just call a professional terminator who uses the proper insecticides, and you can get rid of beg bugs. The downside is you usually cannot occupy the space for at least a few days.

I know of no hotels that bother with diatomaceous earth, so I presume it either doesn’t work sufficiently often, or it takes too long to work.

Diatomaceous earth is very messy and slow.

A quick search tells me hotels usually do heat treatment. It requires a professional (or in house set up). I suspect they also wrap the mattresses by default, but I'm not sure that's strictly a bed bug measure.

Bed bugs are everywhere though. They will infest any public space with furniture, or any space like hotels where anybody can come in and out. They have infested my local movie theaters (at least the older ones). I bet there are a lot of airlines with this issue.

Then what is the purpose of the diatomaceous earth?

The GP's post implies some sort of causal relationship between placing the cover on the mattress and the bugs then being forced to crawl over the DE. I still do not see what the relationship is.

They'll nest in just about anything with nooks and crannies, and don't only feed at night - they adjust to your schedule. When I had them, they first got to my couch, not my bed, and would also go after my feet while sitting at my desk.

That sounds so awful to experience!

How hard was it to finally get rid of them?

It took months before I actually saw one and realized I wasn't just reacting to something else (I had just changed laundry detergents when it started, for example), but after that it was one single heat treatment - had to leave for around 7 hours while the pest company brought in heaters and raised my apartment to 140 degrees for 5+ hours. Took several more hours afterwards to get back down to a normal temperature. Prep involved moving anything heat-sensitive (like batteries) into the fridge and spreading out things like tightly-packed clothing drawers so the heat could penetrate more easily.

Also the heat treatment isn't guaranteed to kill all of them, but it does damage them so they can't bite anymore. There were a few survivors I saw running around for months afterwards slowly starving since they couldn't feed. GGP saying they only survive a month is definitely wrong - the rule of thumb is 6 months, and I remember seeing a reference that they can feed on each other so a few would last longer.

This is assuming they aren't hiding in your other clothes or fabrics, which they are very good at doing. There's a reason why "burn the house down" is a common retort to people asking about bed bugs. They are damn near impossible to get rid of.

I've experienced living with bed bugs during my boarding school years. Despite getting multiple bug bites a week consistently for a couple years, I never actually got to see a live bed bug.

Bed bugs are no joke

That's strange. Apparently, the only time I ever met any, they must have been very hungry - they crawled right at me over the open bedsheet when the light was still on. I killed the front of the first assault wave and got the hell out of that crappy hotel room.

If you could see several of them, that meant that that hotel room had TONS AND TONS of them.

Every time I wake up with a itchy spot, my mind goes directly to bed bugs. How did you know they were bed bugs and not another bug bite?

“Breakfast, lunch, dinner”. At least 2, but many times 3 bites in a line every few centimeters. But generally, there are a line of bites.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bed+bug+bite+picture&t=iphone&iax=...

Note that some people attract bed bugs, and some people don’t. One time, I woke up with 40+ bites, and my wife with none. She has never been bit in her whole life, and I have been bit on at least 7 or 8 different occasions during my travels.

Also possible she was bit, but didn't react to the bites. Not everyone does.

There’s evidence of bedbugs.

If you never saw any evidence at all then it’s more likely scabies.

multiple/week is pretty infrequent for bed bugs. I've gotten more from spiders (proportionally; I vacuumed them up after the first night)

Strange because you’d think it easy to fix.

Bedbugs are highly temperature sensitive…. treatment involves raising the temperature of infested rooms.

And aero plane interiors can get very hot if they sit on the runway without the aircon.

A few hours of the plane being hot should wipe them all out.

> A few hours of the plane being hot should wipe them all out.

That's a few hours where the plane couldn't run a flight. I'm guessing most of the 'normal maintenance' doesn't give enough time for everything to get hot enough.

Or, inversely, whatever 'schedule' they are trying to do, isn't quite enough which makes them more voracious [0]. You'd still need to get the temp above 130-150F for 5-10 minutes throughout [1]

All of that said, short of a -rabid- infestation you'd not expect to see one on you unless it's a long flight. I wonder if good countermeasures [2] just don't play well with airline ventilation?

[0] - General understanding is that the metabolism is very temperature based; high temperatures will cause fast die-off but much of that is added cold-blooded metabolism crossed with general tendency to need food/hydration.

[1] - Watch a 'heat treatment' video; the bugs often scatter panicked trying to find something tolerable.

[2] - AFAIK a desiccant (e.x. DE or Cimexa) is great against all sorts of 'pests' but applied wrong it can cause breathing issues short or long term.

> You'd still need to get the temp above 130-150F for 5-10 minutes throughout

To ensure everything is heated up effectively, without cold pockets for them to hide in, the heat is maintained for around 6 hours. It then can take several more to cool down to normal.

> A few hours of the plane being hot should wipe them all out.

The article addresses this. Quoting:

The process typically takes two to five days and can cost airlines between $75,000 and $125,000 when accounting for lost revenue and treatment expenses. “They do have a bit of a protocol to work from,” Mr. Tuck said. “You’ll pull the airplane out of service and you’ll bug bomb it.” But without a spare aircraft available for long-distance routes, airlines face difficult decisions, particularly when passengers report infestations mid-journey.

> the attendant dismissed their concern

I found Turkish airlines staff to be more stand-offish than others when I flew with them internationally a few years back. Is that anybody else's everyday experience with them?

had a instance with them where I need the bare minimum of customer service. There was none. Won't fly again.

Last time I flew with Turkish Airlines, they gave me the wrong seat number (which was in business class), and then once they realised their mistake, the flight attendant shouted at me and told me to go sit in economy.

Savages.

My story involves flying over Nepal in a place where you definitely could not see Everest out of the window and having the pilot saying "look out the window, it's Everest!". Pretty sure it was K2 as the plane was west of KTM.

https://archive.is/m5e2m

Here is a fun YouTube video about research based eradication of bed bugs [0] Lots of facts like bed bugs don't carry or transmit diseases.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAOTJxYqh8

I wonder if after long term exposure one would suffer no symptoms from their bites at all

Is this a recent phenomenon? Planes have been flying around for decades.

You'd think every airport and every airline would've been infested by now.

I think as a practical matter they depend on people sleeping to survive. That's something I've rarely been able to achieve at an airport or on an airplane but a lot of people can and it seems to have gotten more common, especially with delays.

People not aware that DEET bug spray is effective in airports/airplanes/public transportation for lice/bedbugs seems to be a recent phenomenon.

Do you put on bugspray before riding public transit?

I had bed bugs and after I'd recommend cimi-shield treatment. It's a soybean based treatment that as far as I know is one of the safest treatments and long lasting (1yr+) (but expensive so rarely offered). Even dimactous earth can be a breathing hazard if stirred up and you have to leave it round visibly.

It's always a good idea to check the bed and mattress of a hotel/motel/hostel room before settling in, even with upmarket hotels. Look for small dark spots in the mattress folds and crannies, these are their faeces. If there is a bad infestation you can really suffer.

See Greg Ovens (great YT channel by the way) talk about his awful experience staying in a motel - https://youtu.be/AOe9mvA3zoA?feature=shared

General advice regarding bedbugs…..

Staying in a hotel, don’t leave bags clothes or anything lying around in the floor furniture or bed, put all your stuff in the bath/shower.

When you arrive check the mattress and it’s seams for signs of bedbugs (look up pics on Google of what to look for).

When you get home if you suspect you’ve brought some home, don’t bring anything at all into the house including shies and every single atom you are carrying.

If you can, if you have a freezer big enough, it’s a great weapon in the fight against bedbugs. Freeze everything you can that won’t get damaged by cold. Sheets clothes bags shoes bedding just go on a freezing frenzy.

Study up on diatomaceous earth solutions.

When traveling with a family, we have 4 suitcases. No bathroom we have encountered has that much space.

Why don’t hotels just start building purpose built tiled areas to store suitcases etc? If I put suitcase in a plastic bag that should help right?

Confirming my rule: if you can’t reach it with United, Lufthansa or ANA - it’s not worth flying to.

Granted all of these have things wrong (LH C is ancient and has no privacy, UA staff is hit and miss, ANA is mostly excellent).

I don’t like changing planes in the desert thus the Arabian ones are off the plate…

I don't know about the other two, but Lufthansa? thats a low bar. I'd prefer Singapore, Air New Zealand or Qantas. Qatar would feature, but the molesty episode makes them too intense.

https://apnews.com/article/qatar-australia-united-arab-emira...

If I need to go to Singapore sure. If I need to go to down under or New Zealand sure.

ANA is good but isn't even the best airline in its' own country. LH isn't the best airline in its' own group (Swiss and Austrian have better seats/service, and Swiss has equivalently good coverage).

United is probably the best US airline for international but domestically Delta is arguably better.

I detest Swiss for forcing me to watch ads - also their service is hit or miss (okay same for lh) Austrian just doesn’t have any routes I need. JAL is on the wrong alliance thus I have only domestic experience.

Agreed. JAL for the win.

United? I don't have much preferences with airlines, but I had a really bad experience with United, so I try to avoid them as much as possible.

Maybe they should add that to the swanky ads they put on TV to try and con you into visiting their, ahem, country.

Apparently permethrin can be used against bedbugs much as it can be used against ticks.

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