Sunbed wars!!

I'd be irritated by this too.

We were at a Eurocamp last week and they handled it brilliantly. The pool was enclosed and locked until 10am but people would queue at 10, reserve beds and go off for the day. On really busy days where all the loungers were taken, the lifeguards would make an announcement and ask everyone to get out of the pools and return to their loungers. Then they would go round all the loungers without people and collect the towels. They clearly loved doing it and thanked everyone for playing Top Towel 😄

Watching people return hours later and try to work out what had happened was amusing!

I was in Rhodes last year and a couple of times we came back to our hotel quite late at night and towels were all laid out on sunbeds ready for the morning. Our hotel had a fairly small pool area and there weren’t enough beds to go round, so they were always all reserved by the crack of dawn.

If you complained, staff would remove them if they’d been left for more than an hour, but they weren’t proactive.

I went on holiday earlier this year and staff would put the sunbeds away at night and then got them out in the mornings. Only hotel issued towels were allowed on the beds and towels were labelled and allocated to each room. If a towel was left on a bed unattended for more than an hour they were removed and you had to ask for them back. It seemed to stop it as there were always sunbeds available.

Just come back from a hotel in Greece where any lounger left unused for 45 minutes all the stuff gets collected. Seemed a good system.

100% this @ForMintShaker

there is absolutely no point at all in leaving a shitty review when you’ve left!

photograph it now, email the manager and tell them to manage this situation ! It’s your holiday too.

and move the chair/belongings, sit there yourselves and deny all knowledge of their stuff lying at the bottom of the pool

woman up!

How pathetic and selfish! 🙄

Had sunbed wars at HV Ibiza, really depressing and took the shine off tbh. We’re on holiday, just let us come down to the bloody pool when we are ready and lay on a sunbed!!!!
I would try a slightly different area @ForMintShaker , you’re going back to the same group that are annoying you and it’s probably grating more and more. Draw a line and sit somewhere slightly different.
We’ve never done an AI since! Covid hit the following year and 2021 we didn’t go abroad just in case things got cancelled and by 2022 kids were old enough not to need discos etc and we’ve done villas ever since. Bliss!! Get one walking distance to a town square/strip and eat at a nice restaurant every night.

I stayed at a hotel recently, they were ruthless watching bed snatchers.
Towels were removed by staff, some tried holding 3 beds, between sunglasses on one bed, bag on another, staff removed them.

Good grief. It's the main substance of your post, not nitpicking to pick up on it.

Relax "love", you're on holiday.

I do not know where you are OP but that cloudy sky would be depressing me in summer!

We always go to Cyprus, guaranteed bright blue skies July and August

Hotels with allocated beds are

Sunrise Beach
Sunrise Pearl
Sunrise Jade
Olympic Lagoon
Alexander The Great

Most people are in and out of the pool rather than all in it for hours at a time and I don’t know how it’s policed but my guess is that the pool attendant approaches a group of loungers that have been unoccupied for a while and asks people on neighbouring loungers if anyone is using them. If nobody has seen anyone use them for ages they’ll clear the towels.

The good thing about a swim up is you have all the benifits of a hotel but you’re own terrace and space with sunbeds and direct access to the pool. HV Rhodes has a small waterpark and loads of animation and activities (can be a bit full on lol). HV majorca and Ibiza also offer swim ups but these are private pools rather than a main pool which ee prefer

A few years ago we went to Cuba on an AI holiday, it was ok but i prefer a villa with pool as our own space. (And we don't cook, we buy cold meat, fruit and salads at a local supermarket).
But in Cuba, the sun lounger problem didn't exist and i think it was because very few Brits were at the (Spanish run) hotel , the guests were mostly Canadian, Spanish or French. And the vibe was very relaxed.
It was the same in a rather small but smart hotel in northern Italy, guests were mostly Swiss, Luxemburgers, Austrians (could see by the car registrations in the garage) and one or two Brits who had driven there, including us. When we were being shown around the hotel manager proudly said they had twice as many sun loungers around the pool area as they had guests. Always.

Camping up mountains away from people is good.

You can tell who the selfish twats are in here who think this is ok.

We went to a place in Spain last month- Melia Zahara - where there was literally no pool or sunbed activity before 10am. I think the pool didn’t open until 10 which helped.

definitely selfish buggers who dumped their stuff then didn’t return but if you put your stuff down before 10am it would be taken away. The staff also took stuff away if left unattended for more than 45 minutes. They were seen doing this.

you could additionally pay for some special sunbeds for all day use (whether you were sat on them or not). A lot did this.

all very civilised. Hardly any Brits though. Most people were Spanish.

In the 80s we used to go to Minorca to a nice hotel, and my dad used to come out in the morning post breakfast, choose four sun loungers, throw four towels in the pool exclaiming, ooh its a bit breezy! and sit us all down and get his paper out. Never any fisticuffs. I think you just need to employ bit of flair OP!

@ForMintShaker haven't RTFT but if in budget have you considered somewhere with a swim up room? We did a few years in Holiday Village Rhodes with this and swim up is into the main pool. Absolutely ideal while the kids were younger

They had these little pools, I guess for just dipping your feet in, just below knee height, all over the resort around and alongside the main pools, jacuzzis etc. Towels went in those.

They were just super strict about not reserving sun beds. Lots of signs and polite reminders from staff. To be fair there was plenty of room when we went, but there was an area close to a bar overlooking the sea that people would try and claim.

Only once though, haha.

Oh please.

I'd love the name of any hotels that do reserved sunbeds at their pools or beach? It would be worth the extra money to me.

Ah just move it and tell her she’s a twat if she confronts you about it. In reality she probably won’t care about having to move it back a few ft when she returns.

We were in Jamaica this time last year and on our first day we went to breakfast at 7:30 (joys of holidaying with a small baby) and passed the pool. All the sunbeds had towels on. After breakfast there was still no one really at the pool but towels everywhere. We just moved some towels and got on the beds expecting someone to come and whinge at us eventually.

What we observed were people arriving at the pool, tipping the pool guy and being shown to sunbeds. Essentially the pool guy was reserving them all and handing them out for tips 🤷🏻‍♀️

We didn’t alert the hotel to it because tbh the staff weren’t paid very well and I figured that most people would just plonk themselves down anyway.