Court ruling warns resorts over towel-led sunbed wars on holidays
A German family’s Kos holiday ended in court after towels saved loungers by dawn, turning a common nuisance into a compensation claim worth €986.70.
David Eggert’s family holiday to Kos ended up in a Hanover courtroom after the simplest piece of beach equipment became the main point of dispute: a sunbed. Eggert said he woke at 06:00 and spent about 20 minutes looking for loungers for his family of four, only to find them already reserved with towels despite a hotel ban on the practice.
The Hanover district court agreed the package holiday was defective because the loungers were effectively unusable, and it increased a tour operator’s initial €350 offer to €986.70, about £850. The family had paid €7,186 for the trip. Eggert also told the court that his children sometimes had to lie on the floor because no loungers were available. The ruling is now being read as a warning that towel-led sunbed wars are no longer just a nuisance; they can amount to a consumer-rights failure.
The case matters because it shifts the debate from bad manners to enforcement. The hotel had a rule against reserving loungers with towels, but the ban was not enforced. Judges said a travel company still had a duty to provide a reasonable number of loungers and a fair access arrangement, even when it did not directly run the hotel. That makes persistent inaction over reserved sunbeds look less like a minor irritation and more like a breach in the holiday product itself.
Hotels and operators are already trying different fixes. Some resorts now allocate sunbeds from check-in so guests cannot stage a pre-dawn dash. Thomas Cook once trialled a pre-bookable service called Choose Your Favourite Sunbed, charging an extra €25 for the promise of a guaranteed spot by the pool. The idea was to replace the scramble with certainty, and to stop guests from rising before sunrise just to protect a patch of plastic.
The pressure on resorts is growing because the problem is so familiar across Europe. Reports from Spain have described fines of €250 for guests who reserve loungers and then disappear for hours, while videos from Tenerife have shown holidaymakers sleeping on sunbeds overnight to secure their place. For resorts selling a family break, the message from Hanover is clear: if a lounger cannot actually be used, the holiday may not be delivering what was promised.
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