Help! Roach in my Orlando resort room!

In My Humble Opinion
1

So we drive from Indiana to Orlando for a week of fun and sun. We check into a nice resort room, which is clean and fancy. Everything is good until…

I saw a giant brown roach on the living room wall :eek::eek::eek:

This is a problem for me, as I have a huge creepy phobia about roaches. I understand that Florida is a tropical environment, and “palmetto bugs” are more common. But are they just part of the experience?

My husband told me that he was standing in the (outdoor) elevator area, and saw one crawling up the wall. A passing maintenance man smashed it on his way by, and glanced at my husband with a embarrassed grin. I called the front desk, and they said to talk to the front desk in the morning. I was told that they don’t have a roach “problem” and have a pest control company they work with. I assume they can have the room sprayed with boric acid or something.

So tell me - how freaked out should I be? Since roaches are one of my top three phobias, and Florida is a creepy-crawly paradise, I don’t want to overreact. But, again…

:eek::eek::eek::eek:

2

Yes, this is just a reality in places like Florida.

In general, the really large roaches, like it sounds like you are describing, come in from the outside. Just like you might get a housefly in your house, but not have a fly infestation, these large roaches occasionally wind up inside. By large I mean 4 inches and often flying. The infestation roaches, also common in Florida, tend to be more like 1 inch and IME less likely to fly around. Also, with that kind you often see more than 1.

So my vote is to get your husband to kill or remove the intruder, and don’t worry too much about it.

Either that, or turn around and leave Florida if you really can’t stand it. Because they are seriously all around in Florida and Louisiana.

3

I’d be angry and I’d complain to the front desk. Yes, they are a fact of life in Florida but that doesn’t mean you can’t make the hotel aware of it and perhaps pressure them to move you to a different (nicer) room. That room might have an issue too but you can do nothing but benefit from complaining.

This type of issue might even persuade me to shop for another hotel, a high rise building might have fewer of them.

4

I can see requesting a room change, but I don’t see any reason to get angry at the hotel about it. Florida is teeming with bugs and I don’t think it is humanly possible to keep them all out of buildings.

5

Maybe angry is the wrong word, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a pricey vacation resort to go above and beyond. There’s already a pretty strong bias against hotels for half-assing the cleaning as it applies to linens and bathrooms so I think a bug infestation is a further indication. Maybe they have bed bugs too. In a tropical climate you need to be a little more tolerant but I’ve stayed in enough Florida/New Orleans/Cancun resorts without an issue to think it is preventable. Seeing 2 in broad daylight in one day is an indication of a serious infestation, not a minor trivial one.

6

I’m from Houston and no matter WHAT pest control you employ, those giant flying roaches are very common…they tend to swarm and come inside during thunderstormy weather, esp. (and they can sqeeze in through amazingly thin gaps) We had no infestation in our home, but during certain weather conditions (barometric pressure shifts) we would sometimes get several roaches coming in and flying around like crazy. In broad daylight, yet.

I also hate them, but they can’t hurt you (but they can scare you so bad, they’ll make you hurt yourself, to paraphrase John Henry Faulk:p)

Yes, they fly (usually right at your face) and make scuttling sounds in the night and if you step on one…crunch, EWWWWW!:eek: But they are harmless. They are ubiquitous on the Gulf Coast, and yes, you ARE over-reacting. Kill or catch and release the damn thing and get over it. :slight_smile:

And enjoy your vacation in spite of them!

7

Don’t assume the hotel uses something as benign as boric acid. However, palmetto bugs–rather than cockroaches–generally wander in from outside.

It could be that Florida is not for you. Since you treasure your phobias, with roaches being among the top three, you may be too special to be happy anywhere.

8

:rolleyes:

Palmetto Bug ARE cockroaches.

:rolleyes:

And is the bitchiness really called for?

9

Roaches are just a part of life in a tropical environment.

Short of setting up an entirely sterile environment complete with airlocks, there is really nothing anyone can do. It’s like expecting your hotel room to never have a mosquito in it. You can take measures to make sure you don’t have a huge problem, but you really aren’t ever going to be able to eliminate it. There is no “above and beyond” they could go through that wouldn’t make your room pretty much unusable.

Get hubby to smash them, enjoy your vacation, and thank god you don’t have this problem at home.

10

Right? It was just a question…

I don’t think squeamishness about roaches is uncommon or out of place. I live near Gary and some other hellhole type places, and in my area, roaches are associated with filth and grime and just squalor. I also have a thing about earwigs, due to a nasty experience with a book I’d left propping open a window during a rainstorm.

However, I don’t mind wolf spiders, lizards, ants and a number of other things that squick people out.

In any case, we think it may have run inside while we were carrying our groceries in, or maybe during a fire alarm earlier in the day. The resort is on wooded acreage, so I expect wildlife.

But I’m not above using it to try to maneuver an upgrade or some comps :wink:

11

I grew up around them and I am near phobic of them to this day (for no rational reason, of course) so I don’t fault you for that! I am also generally not squeamish of insects or much else. They just trip my trigger.

When I was about 11, one flew into my hair and I freaked out and my cousins, who were with me at the time, just laughed and didn’t do anything to, as I was screaming for them to “Get it OUT!” :eek::mad:

When I was about 17, I was walking home late one night from a film screening and one ran across my path on the sidewalk. I went out of my way to avoid stepping on it, but the damn thing jigged and jagged and I ended up stepping on it’s butt, for want of a better word, and squoooshing it completely out of it’s skin…this suddenly albino cockroach went right on running around and I danced on one foot for a block, going, “ick, ooohhhh, EWWW!” (a seriously traumatizing experiece at the time :D)

I’ve had them drop on my face while in bed, fly at my face suddenly and cause me to throw myself violently, headfirst, into the dining room table in an attempt to escape (it left a big lump), and otherwise make my life a living hell.

I used to have a dog who would kill them for me…she’d hear me squeal or hollar “roach!” and come running and stomp them to death. :stuck_out_tongue:

I am SO glad I no longer live down there. For many reasons, but this is definately one of them.

12

You can try, but honestly, you probably won’t get them. Palmetto bugs are so ubiquitous that they are in everyone’s hotel room (although not everyone notices or complains) at this time of year, and they can’t upgrade everyone or give everyone comps. In Florida (and most of the South) they aren’t associated with squalor - its just a fact of life - similar to having houseflies.

Watch for the little lizards on the walls, too…

13

Be glad you’re not in the Keys with pythons, scorpions and rats, OH MY!

Seriously though, FL is no place for anyone with a bug issue to be. The palmettos are everywhere and as said above, about as common as houseflies. It’s not a reflection on the quality or cleanliness of a place if you see a few; it’s just the way it is here. Sorry, but that’s a fact.

14

My wife is with you. We vacationed in a condo in Orlando once, and the palmetto bugs definitely made her decide never to go back to Florida.

You think they are bad, wait until you open the outside door sometime and find an alligator sunning itself there. :smiley:

15

In all seriousness, I’ve had to have a huge attitude readjustment since moving to the South regarding “roaches” because I came from the North too and to me all roaches were the same, i.e., in squalid kitchens, in infestations.

Here’s what my pest guy tells me: What most people unfamiliar with roaches think when they hear “roaches,” is of German cockroaches, which are smaller (about 3/4 of an inch), incapable of flight, and the ones you have to worry about really causing an “infestation” in a home. This is extremely unlikely to happen if you keep a reasonably clean home (basement and kitchen especially), keep food put away, and – of course – pay for periodic treatments such as those sold by his company. These are the roaches of movies and TV, shown in filthy ghetto kitchens as a sign of horrifying poverty.

But the American cockroach (a/k/a the “palmetto bug”) and the oriental cockroach are basically outside bugs that don’t particularly want to be in your (clean, not damp) house, can’t survive in your house unless it’s particularly humid, and won’t infest (reproduce extremely rapidly) unless completely undisturbed, which they rarely are in homes. As he explained it, finding one of those types in the house is like finding a spider in the house – maybe not pleasant for you, but it’s unlikely the spider meant to wander in permanently either, and it’s highly unlikey to be a sign of 1000 other spiders lurking. The same is of course true for whatever hotel you’re staying in, although if you want to increase your likelihood of a roach-free stay, you should book a room on a higher floor. Even the ones that fly don’t have reason to go up above the foliage or into rooms located way away from water and food sources.

I was told to keep a clean house, including regularly inspecting and cleaning the basement (basically, “disturb” the whole house); not allow any leaks, standing water, or damp places; keep the foliage off the house (no trees or bushes touching as those are bug highways); keep the food put away; and treat professionally periodically.

And I’ve come to have a degree of peace – well, if not “peace” at least an absence of reflexive horror – about the occasional intruder (of the German or Oriental variety). I usually just relocate them outside, waaaay away from the house, unless they startle me, in which case of course the penalty is death. But basically what I’ve learned is that in the South, there’s roaches and then there’s roaches.

So five years ago, I would have been right there with you – ROACH! OMG!! Now I’d probably just squash or relocate the offender, cursorily inspect the rest of the room to make sure I didn’t find any more or any sign of any more, and move on. Two roaches in the same room, though, and I’d still want a new room.

16

Florida resident chiming in to say: Ditto what everyone else says

17

I think it’s uncharitable and unreasonable for us Florida residents to tell someone to “just get over it”. I’ve been here twenty years and I’ve only just made my peace with the vile creatures in the last four or five, meaning, if I see one I’ll still let out a 1950s style horror movie scream but I can at least manage to dispose of the corpse after a little psyching myself out. When I first moved here and I encountered one I would ask anyone, anyone at all to deal with it, personal safety or reputation be damned. They’re simply overwhelming to someone that has any kind of bug phobia. And while it’s true that it’s not a cleanliness issue and they are ubiquitous, I’ve never seen one in a hotel room and if I did I’d probably deal with it accordingly but if I saw more than one I’d be asking for some sort of solution from management.

18

As most everyone has said, they are a fact of life in humid climates. Fortunately, they’re in season most of the year so you’re good with bagging any you see. You will, of course, need a .50 caliber, so definitely alert the neighbors before opening fire.

More seriously, be sure to turn on lights if you go walking around the room after dark. They mostly come out at night. Mostly. And you do not want to step on those bleepers while stumbling sleepily to the bathroom; it is a rude and most unpleasant awakening to feel the struggles under your bare foot.

19

Meh, they are everywhere in Florida. Catch the bugger, paint a number on it and enter it in a roach race. mrAru had the champion roach racer in his barracks when he was stationed in Orlando back in the day =)

20

The pest control guy didn’t know what he was talking about (a common characteristic of his tribe :slight_smile: who typically get trained in marketing, not entomology). One thing is true, many cockroach species in Florida are outdoor-only and never infest structures. But the American and Oriental roaches are not in that category. They, along with the German roach, are “cosmopolitan domiciliary pests” (to quote Roth & Willis, Biotic Associations of Cockroaches) and infest basements and crawl spaces, offices and apartments, food stores, food packing plants, and restaurants unless reasonable precautions are taken to deny the roaches food and water sources. Good pest control practices also help, in the case of roaches. A hotel room (especially if on an upper floor) is not an especially likely place for an infestation, so what people are saying about the original poster’s hotel is valid.

The pest control guy also does not seem to know what a house spider is. Either that or he does know, but is trying to sell you worthless perimeter treatments. 95% of spiders found indoors belong to house spider species seldom if ever found outdoors. Not that there’s anything wrong with having a permanent house spider population, even if the idea does freak you out :). With only a couple of exceptions, house spider species are entirely beneficial. See five common myths about house spiders. Incidentally, insecticide treatments of any kind are almost futile against spider populations; effective spider control involves physical modification.