It is hard for me to think of a company that has more negatively impacted my life. I have procrastinated on this review for months because the memories are so painful, but I want to warn other potential customers.
We received a Terminix one-year package when we closed on our mountain home in Chaffee County. The home had rodents. Terminix never did a good job with the rodents, and we identified many holes the techs had missed which we patched ourselves, but that's just bad or incompetent business, not terrible business.
A few days after we moved in, we discovered what looked like dead bed bugs in a semi-finished attic bedroom and throughout the house. Terminix came out, inspected the rooms, and took many dead bugs. Their "entomologist" confirmed some days later that they were indeed bed bugs. My husband and I had not been bitten yet or seen live bugs. This was a ~3300 square foot house, and Terminix wanted something like $500 per room for treatment. There were over four bedrooms scattered over different floors, and I had seen dead bugs all over. We opted to wait. We started seeing live bugs---which never bit us---and I ended up treating the whole house myself several times with multiple chemicals (Gentrol, Temprid, Cimexa), suspecting I would be more thorough. My husband and I barely slept, my mother delayed moving in with us until I could complete treatments, we threw out items we could no longer donate---an enormous toll on our mental health and several thousand dollars in extra rent and supplies, not to mention our time. I was already doing emergency work on COVID-19 that took all my capacity.
It took me only brief poking around a few months later to discover that the house had had a bat problem, and we had bat bugs, not bed bugs. It was extraordinarily obvious in retrospect, and multiple Terminix technicians had misidentified the bat poop in the semi-conditioned attic as rodent poop, failed to see the fecal blood spots on the rafters near soffits, failed to check the unconditioned attic, etc. We called Terminix and begged them to come out and seal attic openings before the bats returned in spring. Terminix delayed our repeated urgent requests for over six weeks and would not arrange to visit before the bats arrived. Bats were covered in their one-year service contract.
Although Colorado does not legally protect bats during the breeding season, it's pretty horrible (and smelly) to arrange exclusions that will leave baby bats to die in the attic, so we had to wait until late summer at this point. That meant we would have another round of bat bugs to contend with. We had been hoping to rent out our home that summer and fall, so this was a major financial loss. We also had to deal with the bats themselves: one flew into our bedroom at night, and I awoke with a rash on my arm. I drove to El Paso County to get a rabies vaccine, costing me two working days during a busy period and hundreds of dollars for the vaccine. Without the pre-exposure series, it could have cost me tens of thousands for emergency immunoglobulin injections and far more vaccinations.
We set aside some vacation time in mid-August to meet with Terminix so they could do the bat exclusions. They had been to our house several times at this point and assured us they could do the exclusions. (Although they scheduled the first visit a few weeks in advance, they repeatedly refused to tell us when they could complete the second part of the exclusions, which is supposed to happen roughly a week later---the uncertainty greatly complicated our scheduling.) When they arrived for that first exclusion visit, they discovered their ladder wasn't tall enough. At this point they said we would get something of a refund. The money would have gone to the realtor who paid for it, and we don't know if Terminix followed through. We were hardly made whole.
Our handyman, who likes roofs, did the exclusions easily.
Aside from their gross incompetence identifying and dealing with bats and bat bugs, it is hard to overstate how difficult it was to get Terminix to return calls and commit to appointments. Fruitless painful hours. We discovered astounding, persistent communication gaps between their central customer service and CS office. Our lives would have been enormously better without them. read more