[Resolved]  Sharma Transports — Bed bugs in "Luxury Coach"

Address:

Bangalore, Karnataka

I reside in Bangalore and am a regular traveller to Pala. This writing is based on my travel experience between Oct 2010 - Nov 2010.

During this period, I was travelling almost every week to my native town, Pala (Kottayam). As I personally knew the travel agents, I booked tickets through them for Sharma Transports (www.sharmatransports.com). Bus would be either Volvo 2X2 A/C (via Kottayam) or non-AC semi-sleepers (via Mundakayam).

Both the buses have, especially the Volvo, had a lot of bedbugs on them (in malayalam, mootta :-), on every seats with characteristics such as big, black, easily visible using naked eyes.

As soon the sun sets, you can see travellers starting itching their hands, feets, even their face due to bedbug bites.. It will continue throughout the night and you can feel a lot of insects running through you body, every where, including private regions. So terrific and annoyoing, as you could imagine. Everytime, after the travel, I call to their office and they always say, "sorry to hear that, but it mihght have happened since we used the spare bus on that day". One thing I would like to say, they are very polite in replying this, though. But I wonder why they are using 'spare bus' on every day, or is that the word they use for the 'regular bus'.

The issues with bedbugs are, in my view:
1. itching/irritation for atleast 3 days
2. swelling where we got bitten and heavy scratching required
3. bags/luggages can contain bedbugs and they can multiply in thousands in a few days time. (which means, if your dress/bags/lugguages contain a pair of them, high chances are there that you take them home and they multiple there. You can see a lot of similar stories from internet. Just imagine your home has children living there)
4. If you tell your family (or they see you scratching yourself), they don't allow you get in to the home, unless you change your dress and take a dettol bath. If you are going to a relative/friends home, where you have no optoin to tell them/change dress/bath before entering house, you are doing really making them abandon their house by contaminating it with bedbugs which will multiple in thousands.
4. really hard to remove them from home, unless you heavily apply pesticides and stay away for atleast a week)

Considering all these, I really want to travel on a sharma transports with no bedbugs. This way I can help my friends who are travel agents and that also help me in obtaining tickets easily. Now a days, I trying to get tickets from other travel agents on other buses (like kallada, A1, SPS etc) for the fear spreading begbugs to my home.

Also, let me know how can I advise/assist more to Sharma Transports people to get rid of BEDBUGS