No More Towels-as-Bookmarks: Hanover Court Says Tour Operator Must Stop Pool Lounger Hoarding

The ancient ritual of sunrise towel placement, humanity’s low-tech solution to reserving a pool lounger, finally met a more modern opponent: the German legal system. A family who paid about $8,500 for an 11-night package at a premium Kos resort in August 2024 won a partial refund after loungers were effectively taken offline by draped towels and absent guests.

The hotel had signs limiting towel reservations to 30 minutes without use, which is the hospitality equivalent of putting up a stop sign on a racetrack. Every morning, by 8 or 9 a.m., the pool area was a sea of unoccupied sun beds covered in towels. On the one day the family found two chairs, the children, aged 9 and 12, ended up lying on towels on the ground while adults made do with the salvaged loungers. A video shown in court and a witness’s testimony about searching the resort in 95-degree heat helped make the case that access to pool beds was effectively blocked.

The family raised the problem with their tour guide and the hotel repeatedly. Nothing changed. So they sued their tour operator, and the Hanover District Court found there was a “travel defect” in the package: paying customers who couldn’t reasonably use the resort’s amenities.

The court ordered TUI Deutschland to reimburse roughly $1,200, about a 15 percent price reduction for the days the family couldn’t access loungers. The decision stressed that children have the same right to a sun bed as adults, so one day of partial luck didn’t remediate the defect. TUI Deutschland declined to comment and cannot appeal because the payout falls below the legal threshold.

This wasn’t a one-off. A December 2023 Hanover ruling reached the same conclusion for a family on Rhodes, awarding about $380 on a $6,200 trip. Tour operators had defended the towels-as-reservations practice as nothing more than a “peaceful race” for spots, but the court’s practical question, whether tolerating the practice is part of a proper package tour, was answered plainly: operators must intervene.

There’s a neat irony here: a primitive piece of cloth became a makeshift reservation system that solved the problem of “where will I sun?” while creating three new problems, empty loungers, frustrated families, and courtroom paperwork. Hotels that post rules without enforcing them have effectively outsourced enforcement to towels, which are terrible at conflict resolution.

If you run a package holiday, the takeaway is simple: either make pool access work for paying guests or be prepared to hand back part of the bill. And if you’re a vacationer, a towel still won’t hold up in court, so maybe bring a plan that isn’t foldable linen. The lounger wars are over, and the judge has the sunbed.