A family couldn’t get a sun lounger at their resort. They sued and won

In the battle for the sun lounger, it may no longer be towels at dawn. Frustrated dad David Eggert has claimed a victory in the German courts this month, receiving more than €900 ($1583) after his package holiday was deemed “defective” because his family could never find vacant sun loungers during their stay at a five-star hotel on the Greek island Kos.

During the holiday, which took place in 2024, Eggert said he had been unable to find a free sun lounger despite getting up at 6am. He claimed the resort had failed to enforce its own ban on reserving loungers with towels and said his children had been forced to lie on the ground.

The ruling means hotels may now be more inclined to stop sun lounger hoggers in their tracks.

“The recent legal case has helped shift sunbed management from being seen as a day-to-day operational issue to something with more direct financial and liability implications,” says Jill Fielding of digital sun lounger reservation system Reservato.

“That’s made the problem much more tangible for hotel groups and operators, and it’s driving stronger demand for a solution. We have been inundated with enquiries during the past week.”

And that will be a relief to families including the Keenans, from Cardiff, who spent three hours waiting for one hotel sun lounger between six of them on the first day of their trip to Benalmadena, Spain, in 2025, according to Wales Online.

This bad press is terrible for the hotels in question, but it’s not just newspaper reports that put would-be guests off booking. TripAdvisor reviews and social media reels reveal pool lounger angst in a plethora of resorts. Combine that with the inevitable towel rage from angry bed-seekers and it’s easy to see why hotels are increasingly taking action.

Here’s how they’re fighting back:

The battle against the early birds

You know the type. They set their alarms way before the breakfast buffet opens and sneak out with a towel for each family member, which they proceed to lay lavishly over several of the best loungers (the ones in prime spots by the pool, with a bit of shade and a bit of sunshine).

No longer. Hotels are punishing rather than rewarding the worst offenders by removing their towels.

According to reports from former guests, you and your towel must stick together at Gran Canaria’s Gloria Palace San Agustin if you’re by the pool before 10am. Otherwise you may find that it disappears.

It’s a technique that’s widely used in Spain, including on the sand. In 2024, Calpe’s council tackled beach hoggers by threatening to impound the belongings of those who laid out towels, umbrellas or chairs before 9am, thus preventing cleaners from doing their jobs.

Increasingly militant hotel policies may disproportionately affect dawdlers as well as early risers. If you spend too long in the water, you may return from a long soak to find your belongings have disappeared, because some places have started removing them from sun loungers if unattended for an hour (hotel rules warn that this may be the case at the Sol Príncipe Torremolinos, for example).

Meanwhile, on the Canary Islands, a clutch of the most upmarket hotels have worked out a way to prevent dawn lounger manoeuvres altogether – by locking the pool area until after breakfast. One holidaymaker reported the whole thing being “very civilised”.

The great sun lounger giveaway

Frequent fisticuffs by the baby pool are not a good look for a hotel – and it’s bad for staff morale too. To stop disagreements before they happen, some have begun allocating one sunbed to each guest on arrival, especially in lounger-war hotspots such as mainland Spain, the Canaries and the Greek Islands. At many Cyprus resorts, including the Amanti Hotel, guests are allocated their own loungers at check-in for the duration of their stay.

This method is not without pitfalls. What if your designated sunbed is beside a smelly drain 10 rows from the pool? On finding that they were shoved onto the grass rather than poolside at their hotel in Spain, guests at one resort told a Facebook forum that they had to wait a couple of days before the sun lounger supervisor could move them to a better position.

Going digital

Forward-thinking hotels are moving away from old-fashioned “towel-based systems” and into the world of in-app reservations, according to Reservato, which allows guests to touch a button with their phone and see whether a lounger is available and book, even if there is a towel on it.

“Conversations with hotel managers and cruise directors around the world revealed a consistent theme: while policies existed, the tools to enforce them did not. This lack of practical solutions created ongoing ambiguity and conflict. As IT specialists, we modelled a manual process to manage the issue before developing technology to automate it,” says Fielding.

The company plans to roll its system out across Palace Resorts worldwide and is seeing interest from high-end hotels in Thailand and South Africa, but “Reservato was initially developed for high-volume Spanish resort destinations, where sunbed demand and guest flow are most intense, and we continue an active marketing campaign focused on expanding adoption across Spanish resorts,” says Fielding.

QR-code systems are becoming popular too, allowing guests to access a map from their phones in their rooms and then book accordingly up to 24 hours in advance.

Meanwhile, at Tenerife’s Iberostar Sabila, the sun loungers are numbered. Guests look at a map online once they’ve checked in and reserve their places through the Iberostar app, while some sunbeds are reserved for those with reduced mobility.

The pre-holiday add-ons

You pay extra online to secure your plane seat, your baggage allowance, and your on-board meal. It follows that you could be asked to pay to book your sun lounger while you’re at it.

The notion of bagging a lounger ahead of time isn’t a new one. Back in 2018, now-defunct operator Thomas Cook began offering reservations through its “book your favourite sun lounger” service.

Holidaymakers at 50 of the brand’s hotels could consult a map and choose spots in the shade, near the pool or closer to the bar – for €25 per lounger per day. Though that may seem steep, half of available loungers were reserved through the service. Could it be time for another brave package operator to bring the idea back?

In the meantime, busy Italian campsites used by big-name operators offer the means to reserve a lounger by booking direct (for a fee). It’s a must at some sites during high season, where the round-the-pool crowds can resemble the stands at a London derby.

The pay-per-use system

It’s not just campsites that are topping up rates with sun lounger hire. Savvy hotels have also begun to charge for loungers in exclusive areas, such as around rooftop pools or in adults-only sections. It seems a little unfair when guests have already parted with money for the facilities (and presumably, they hope, sends enough people to the public beach for the sun loungers to go round).

It’s not an entirely new phenomenon. At the poshest French Riviera hotels, where lying out on the sand of an accompanying beach club provides the ultimate cachet (especially if you’re on the front row), they’ve been doing this for years. City hotels are fans too: high-end Tokyo ones often add ¥4000 ($35) plus per dip to the cost of checking in – which should definitely put those early-rising towel-wielders off.

The Telegraph, London