Are bedbugs really endemic on Long Island?

If you have a bedbug on you, it's going to die as soon as you spend any time in the sun or a heated room

I doubt every room in every hotel is infested with bed bugs. There are You Tubes and articles about how to inspect for the critters, so do that before you go in. I find that Trip Advisor is good for reading reviews, folks would NOT be shy about mentioning them in a review. Your sister can be concerned, but there's no reason to go nutso.

The formatting on this is kind of stupid, but the EPA provides a http://www2.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2013-12/documents/bedbug-tips.pdf that you can take with you with pictures of bedbugs and tips for places to check in your hotel room and how to manage your belongings.

Just don't have your luggage touching the bed. Don't lay your suitcase on the bed, don't lean anything up against the bed. It's a misconception that bedbugs only live in beds. They're just as likely to live in baseboards and go out looking for food at night. If you're worried, keep your luggage in the bathtub. When you get home, run all your clothes through the dryer and maybe spray your luggage with Raid. (I've worked in backpacker hostels. I've had more bedbug bites than I'd care to admit, but they're never followed me around)

It's a problem, but I'm not sure it's as universal as she thinks. Have you tried looking up the hotel at a bedbug registry? http://www.bedbugregistry.com/ Sure they can be crowd-sourced and unreliable but at least if it DID have something about bugs being at your hotel you'd know and could make plans. Or if your hospitality friend trusts her registry so much ask her to look up your hotel for you?

It also depends on how careful you're willing to be. [On preview, this is just a process I made up, and I see there's an official protocol linked above.] If you were concerned, you could leave the suitcase in the car, assume the clothes you wear in the hotel room are "contaminated," bring them home in a plastic bag, and launder and dry them on super-hot. (So, you know, don't enter the hotel room wearing your wool sweater and silk scarf.) Shower just before you leave, and have brought in one set of clothing that you laid near the bathtub when you arrived (i.e., not on the bed) to wear on your way out. Don't leave your shoes near the bed; leave them some distance from everything. Checking the bed for bed bugs is a 15-30 minute process, a major workout, and a way to learn more than you want to know about the cleanliness of any hotel room and the state of their matress. (A real search, I believe, involves looking behind the headboards and examining both sides of the mattress. Removing and replacing the headboard, and flipping the mattress, are hard to do alone.) I personally have started giving the mattress a very half hearted look, to make sure there's nothing egregious, but relying more on the "assume the place is infested" routine.

I would think that you'd be fine, but as a possible alternative, maybe you could find a place through Airbnb. No guarantee that it's safer, though if it's a room in someone's home you'd think they might be more aware if they have bedbugs or not...just a thought.

Just don't have your luggage touching the bed. Don't lay your suitcase on the bed, don't lean anything up against the bed. Bed bugs are killed by heat. If you have a bedbug on you, it's going to die as soon as you spend any time in the sun or a heated room. If bedbugs are on your clothes, they will no longer be on your clothes after you run them through the dryer. (And if you're really concerned about clothes you wash with cold water and don't put into the dryer, you can easily kill any bed bugs that might be on the item by blasting it with a hairdryer.) The big risk of bed bugs is if you encourage them to crawl into your luggage (much harder to get bed bugs out of a suitcase than out something you're actually wearing). So just keep your luggage away from the bed and you're fine.

Thank you, everyone! I am grateful for the resources to help me search them out once I arrive. Pie Ninja, I very kindly intimated to my sister that 4 hours on Amtrak and LIRR will probably expose me to worse things than bedbugs. It didn't matter - it was the hotel that would be the culprit. Most of all, thank you for alleviating my main concern - that I had no choice but to haul a new community back to my mom's place.