I’ve never understood buying a plane ticket and paying for a resort – and then having to get up at 6 o’clock in the morning just to reserve a pool or beach chair in order to ‘relax’. That puts me out of step with many travelers who flock to resorts where this is the standard.
Just this. Its 7 AM and everything is “taken”.
byu/Krytykx2 inmildlyinfuriating
I do not see how this is an acceptable norm. It’s one thing when your stuff is on a chair and you go to the bathroom or to get a drink. “Saving chairs” with towels left for hours is not acceptable. If hotel staff won’t address it, vigilantism seems like an option – just remove all the towels from loungers.
Otherwise you get scenes like this one. At the Spring Hotel Bitacora in Tenerife here’s video of guests literally lining up at 6:30 a.m. – waiting 90 minutes for the hotel’s pool gates to open at 8 a.m. – so they can storm this relaxation area like it’s Black Friday at Walmart in order to avoid missing out on a chair for the day.
@chloeturner_1 Another day another sunbed war 😂 #holiday #tenerife #playadelasamericas #sunbeds ♬ original sound – Chloe Turner
In Tenerife, Spain I suppose this would be called “the running of the guests.”
Why do great hotels even allow scenes like this dad sprinting from lounge chair to lounge chair, putting down towels to mark territory? He’s ‘doing what he has to do’ for his family, but it’s a shame he has to do it!
It’s been 11 years since I first described a resort as a ‘factory’ and a decade since first using the exact term “resort factory” to describe the Ritz-Carlton Grand Cayman where you’d need to get up early and put a book on a beach chair if you didn’t want to be several rows back from the water. And that’s a Ritz that was going for $1000 a night in-season over a weekend.
People in general are just trash
Who is waiting until 6am to start their day?
Why are people so lazy.
Get up at 4 or 430am and make something of your life.
Even on vacation – get up early, read, make yourself better.
People complaining about waking up at 6am are likely brain dead, at best.
I am sorry… that resort’s pool looks pathatically small and I never seen such small windows on resort rooms overlooking the pool! what’s the name of the resort? if that’s only place I can afford to go, I’d rather stay home.
Wow
Grown adults running around
Saving pool chairs.
Very classy people.
All losers.
Even Carnival Cruises has learned how to police this selfish behavior:
https://help.carnival.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1121/~/reserving-sun-loungers
But I would prefer that they just throw the loot which is used to “reserve” a chair overboard.
@Don. So anyone who doesn’t want to wake up at 4am is lazy?? I think tens of millions of people who keep the world running on 2nd or 3rd shifts while everyone else sleeps would soundly disagree.
Even more people who have to, say, get up at 5-6 to go work an 8+ hour job and don’t get back home until maybe 5-7pm would also call BS on that. You want the recommended 8 hours of sleep per night? That’ll mean going to sleep at 8pm if you get up at 4am. Sorry, but people have families and lives and aren’t going to do that if they have day jobs.
The hotel we stay at in Tenerife is never that bad.
Even though it’s full of Brits and Germans.
Mind you the pool is large and the hotel caters to old people like me.
The ocean and beaches are only across the street so that may help.
The moral is go to a nicer resort that has a private pool for your room/villa, enough pools that there is never a shortage (went to Hard Rock Punta Cana and Beaches Turks where never had a problem finding chairs around a pool since there were so many options), stay at a small boutique resort that has plenty of chairs or (my favorite) rent an upscale chair or cabana so you can get there whenever you want. Many ways to avoid this and, like you I don’t understand it at all.
As I saw so many videos like this, I almost believed it’d be like that in resorts in Europe.
I stayed at a few hotels in Mallorca, Spain, it wasn’t like that at all. I started seeing towels hanging around 9. There were plenty of chairs throughout the day, although the available ones in the middle of the afternoon may not be by the pool.
I wonder if such videos can be taken at only a handful of notorious resorts.
It’s also fishy that one of the video claims chairs were all taken by 6. In Mallorca, it was still dark then, even today, the sun doesn’t rise till 6:22. In Tenerife, it’s even later at 7:08. And we’re almost at the summer solstice.
The Heroic Guest is the one who shows up at 9AM, sees a bunch of empty chairs with towels on them, picks up a towel and places it on the ground, and then sits in the chair.
LOL, I was at Bakers Cat in Key Largo this past spring break and like I do when I am at resort or on a cruise I simply wait 15 minutes to see if anyone is actually using the ‘reserved’ chair and then move the items to another location. When the owners show up I suggest they take it up hotel management. While I have had more than a few angry people I have never once been forced to move. My favorite was when a Mom said to me I would never move someone stuff and I replied I would never get up at 6 am to reserve a chair I wasn’t going to use half the day. She said well everyone does it and I asked is that the lesson she was trying to teach her kids, if everyone is doing it it must be OK.
Germans have entered the chat…
@ Don — Your comment makes zero sense.
Never understood why they don’t just have key card sensors where you have to swipe your room key every hour and if an hour lapse chair is free game. So many times people put the towel down and never even come.
Go on vacation to sit around a pool? Not just that, but you have to compete for a place to sit? Maybe will try it next time to understand the allure, lol.
@Kluge – I admire people who work 2nd and 3rd shifts, but I took Don’s post as a joke with obvious sarcasm.
That “resort” looks like a mediocre suburban apartment complex pool in the U.S. Until reading these blog posts I had no idea people used their money and vacation time to lounge around a pool.
If you have to reserve a chair or lounger it’s not really a luxury resort is it?
No pool chair is worth fighting for. Just go to the Holiday Inn off the highway in Columbus. You can have pool chairs there.
Cruise ships are some of the worst places for these behaviors. Anywhere with perceived scarcity, people react with hoarding rather than through cooperative action. It really is sad.
Just re-arrange all the towels, mixing them up, leaving one ’empty’ chair for yourself.
Alternatively, place all the towels exactly one row back, leaving one for yourself of course.
Stay around to watch the entertainment.
I never see this, because I use resorts as a base, not temporary housing. I despise the resort culture.
Such utter nonsense. Staff should screw with them and remove all the towels as soon as they go back to their rooms.
Definitely Americans, or maybe some other Anglos. The Spanish would never. (I’m American, wish my family/ancestors would’ve stayed in Spain and Portugal though LOL)
@don – you’re a typical boomer. Anything outside of your lifestyle just cannot be comprehended and is lazy, entitled, liberal, insert whatever silly comment you would use.
Yea because you get up at 4am you just cannot fathom why all don’t. And those that don’t are so lazy.
If no one sitting in chair or table, just remove the items by putting them in paper bag near the garbage can with rest of the trash.
On a recent trip to Marriott Vacation Club in Aruba I got up three mornings at 5:15 am and went to grab chaise lounges by the pool at 5:30 – had to sit in them until 7 am – then could leave and had to be back by 9 am and stay there until 10 am and then could leave them alone – all this to make sure we had someplace to sit at 1 pm after lunch!! What a ridiculous process! Just put time limits on people and clean out chairs if they don’t sit in them for an hour. Then you remove all the hoarding. But that takes pool attendants willing to hear people yelling.
Resorts in sunny climes who skimp on enough beach chairs and shade structures for their bookings must really hate their guests. It’s one of the main reasons I grew to dislike tropical “vacations.” I once saw a fistfight break out over a patch of shade. Ridiculous…but we were FRYING.
This beach chair piracy happens alot on cruise ships. Rows of towel lined chairs saved and no one actively on them!! Hmmp
we need tres things to prevent this,
1: signs around about not reserving beach chairs
2:pool concierge to assist the guest
3: Manager on site for all the angry guests about the beach chair
is not easy in this situation, as a guest has difficulty reading signs, respect, guest they don’t care, I been in both side working and guest
When I have time I like to have fun by removing all of the towels on saved chairs. Free entertainment for the rest of the day. My favorites are the ones who show up at 2pm and expect their chair to be waiting. One older fat lady got upset and called over the pool staff but we had already greased him so she was SOL.
I just move a few towels to somewhere out of the way and lay down. Very courteous of others to save chairs for me. If asked I just shrug. Never had that not work.
Or stay at better places where you’ll have a beach / pool attendant set up chairs for you.
If you stay where the trash stays you need to act like they do and toss their stuff.
How is this news? You keep writing on this same topic, recycling the same prose, without posting anything particular novel like video of an actual towel vigilante or something even more interesting.
The must have flown to resort on Southwest.
What happens if someone throws the towel off? Is there a fight? What if 5 of the 6 that three loser “reserved” are thrown away?
Can on simply use the towel to.dry off their sweat or better still, l “floss” their crotch with it?
This is why I live in PHX and have my own resort style pool in the back of the house. When I vacation it’s not to just lounge by the pool. I can stay home to do that
We were at Rose Hall in Montego Bay several years ago, walking around the beach for an hour to find somewhere to sit. Moving towels from two unaccompanied chairs, we sat down and were there for a couple hours before a very riled older British lady came up and accosted us. She couldn’t get over the fact that she’d left for 3 hours and someone had the nerve to use HER chairs. Jesus. Imperialism at its worst.
We removed towels from a couple of chairs after we observed them not being occupied for a couple of hours. When the towel owner finally showed up and asked about the location of her towels we politely pointed at them hanging on the pool fence. She proceeded to tell us that we were rude. And she was not?