The poolside was deserted when we passed on our way to breakfast. This time, I thought, as we ate at the still-quiet restaurant buffet, we’d triumph. Yet arriving back at the pool after eating, all the sun loungers closest to it had already been claimed – by owners who were nowhere to be seen.
Reserving loungers might have been against the hotel’s policy, but removing the towels and beach bags that their claimants had placed on top of them felt like an act of aggression. Instead I sulked silently from my bed near the bins as, an hour later, the family of four who’d taken the plum spot I’d had my eye on for my own family finally sauntered over, ready to spend some time in their premium seats.
That afternoon, something snapped and I decided I wasn’t going to take such flagrant sunbed-snatching lying down. Or rather, I was. The following morning, trialling a new ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ strategy, I too laid down towels to hog the best loungers before breakfast, trying to look as brazen as I could as I walked past the hotel guests I’d gazumped to reclaim them. The victory felt hollow, however, my joy at lying within toe-dipping distance of the pool offset by guilt at cheating the system and paranoia someone would poison my pistachio ice cream in revenge.
Yes, the politics of hotel sun loungers are petty, privileged and laughably entitled. But they’re claiming ever more casualties as this year’s summer holiday season gets under way. In one corner: the serial, shameless hoggers who rise at dawn (or even lay down towels the night before) to reserve seats they don’t plan to use for hours. In the other: strident rule-sticklers who snitch or retaliate by shaming hoggers on social media with video covertly filmed from hotel balconies (TikTok seems to do the biggest trade in #sunbedwars). Then there are the sunbed centrists like me, resentful of ‘lounger louts’, as the tabloid parlance goes, but too conscientious, or cowardly, to routinely take their misplaced towels to task.
A group in our hotel swooped early on the first morning to monopolise 12 loungers with the best view of the beach. By day three they appeared to have acquired squatters’ rights
Recently, the lounger land-grab insanity seems to have escalated a notch. Last month a British guest at a four-star Majorcan hotel reported guests lining up their towels in queue order on the floor at the locked door to the pool area from 6.30 a.m. ‘I must add this wasn’t youngsters, but mostly elderly and middle-aged people,’ he said. ‘Crazy behaviour.’ At another Majorcan hotel last year guests left their towels unfolded on the ground from 5 a.m. to reserve the slot where they wanted their as-yet-unavailable loungers to go. The mother of two who posted the madness on Instagram described the ‘sunbed showdown’ as a ‘British hybrid version of musical chairs meets the Hunger Games’.
The dash for decent loungers can result in injury – one man is reported to have broken his toe at a Gran Canaria hotel – and even police action. In 2007, Welsh coach driver Glyn Bowden got so fed up with guests reserving sun loungers on a private Italian beach that he piled around 20 up and set them alight. ‘I was put in a cell at the local nick for a couple of hours,’ he said. ‘They were going to charge me with criminal damage but the hotel management intervened on my behalf.’
Whether you’re willing to admit it or not, the chances are you’ve reserved a sun lounger you shouldn’t have. A survey of 2,150 adults by online travel agent sunshine.co.uk found that although 98 per cent of respondents felt irritated by other hotel guests reserving loungers, 71 per cent were also guilty of unfairly bagging beds for themselves. That’s a lot of holiday hypocrisy.
Then again, when you’ve spent thousands on a week in the sun, the stakes are high – competition never greater, I’ve found, than on package holidays, where groups of British guests (we are, I’m afraid, by far the worst offenders) tend to arrive on the same day. Last year a group of three families in our hotel swooped early on the first morning to monopolise 12 loungers with the best view of the beach. By day three they appeared to have acquired squatters’ rights, the rest of us begrudgingly accepting that their books, balls and bags were there for the duration.
Perhaps we should have challenged them. Last month honeymooners Thom Aspland and his wife Lisa asserted ownership over reserved loungers at Grand Barong Resort in Bali that had been left unattended for nine hours. When the people who’d reserved them finally returned, ‘they didn’t confront us’, Thom said. ‘They knew what they had done.’
I don’t think I’ve been to a hotel that hasn’t had a sign telling guests not to reserve loungers, but I’ve never seen the policy enforced – perhaps because the problem is too rife, or staff don’t want to risk embarrassing holidaymakers, or both. Little wonder, then, that when staff do intervene, they acquire hero status – as shown last week when a security guard at a Tenerife hotel was lionised after a film of him ripping towels off unused beds went viral on TikTok. ‘Should do this everywhere,’ wrote one woman, who added that on her holiday ‘people were putting towels on beds from midnight’.
Absurdly, much of my time under the parasol is spent pondering a solution. A wider rollout of a 2018 Thomas Cook system in which travellers could pay £22 to reserve a lounger ahead of their arrival might help, as could guests being allocated a lounger that tallies with their hotel room number, which also forces hotels to stump out for more beds. Or perhaps I should just focus on reminding myself, next time I’m confronted with a mass of reserved loungers and a compulsion to throw them all in the sea, that I’m lucky to be on holiday at all.
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