Two days ago, my daughter took a night train from Prague to Amsterdam. She was in a seat, not a sleeper. When she woke up in the morning, she had bites all over her hands, feet, and the strip on her back where her pants and her shirt meet. I suggested it might be bed bugs, since her back wouldn't have been available to mosquitoes.

Sure enough, she found one on the side of her backpack after that. At the moment all of her stuff is in trash bags, but now she's heading to the laundry across the street now to have her clothing run through a dryer, and to get the pack itself steamed. She's putting her papers into bags and going to let them sit in the sun.

Any other suggestions??

Yuck! Worse, In two weeks we're meeting her to travel together in Turkey. Maybe I'll cancel all our triple rooms and get her singles...

This can happen anywhere, and there are plenty of reports of bedbugs in luxury hotels, too.

My only experience with bedbugs was being eaten alive one night in an absolutely charming B&B in Jersey.

Better to be attacked by bedbugs on a night train than armed robbers!

Just make sure she's insanely thorough with the laundry and she should run everything through twice. Bedbugs are horrible and very hard to get rid of.

I experienced bed bugs in Borneo where I awoke on in a hut on Mt Kinabalu covered in bites. The best way to get rid of them is with heat i.e. a very hot iron on clothes with particular attention to the seams (where the little b******s hide) a v.hot wash. With the pack, industrial steaming will help and, just to be absolutely sure, run a cigarette lighter along all the seams to kill any that may be left.

PS Making her sleep in a single room seems a little extreme. Why not just make her wear one of those contamination suits you see forensic scientists wearing on CSI etc!

I would buy a new backpack and some kind of plastic zipped container for papers she needs to keep. Putting the clothes through a hot dryer for 20 minutes to half an hour after they have been washed and are already dry is recommended on most sites I have seen.
Is she sure what she saw is a bed bug? They are really small and hard to see. I know more about them than I ever wanted to because my son had them in an apt in Montreal 2 years ago.

Oh lcuy, how awful for your daughter!

I had a terrible case a few years back, over 30 bites, so I feel her pain. What helped get me thru the itchiness and swelling was lots of Hydrocortisone and Benadryl.