At one hotel in Rhodes, the sunbed hoggers have lost.
Every morning at 8am, a member of pool staff walks the loungers and lifts anything left on an empty bed: towels, hats, bags, the lot.
Lucie Hewes, 19, from the UK, filmed the morning sweep while on holiday in Greece, and her clip has been watched 538,000 times.
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The hotel bans reserving sunbeds outright, she says, but plenty of guests carried on draping towels over the best spots before wandering off to breakfast.
Some went back to bed.
“The pool man comes round at around 8 every morning and removes towels and belongings from the beds with no one sitting on them,” she said.
The morning of reckoning
The aftermath played out roughly as you’d imagine.
Some guests returned to find their belongings gone and stood around looking baffled.
Others found strangers already settled on what they’d decided were “their” loungers.
Lucie had no complaints about the view from her own sunbed.
“It was funny and entertaining to watch and good to see, as the rule of no sunbed reservation is fair,” she said.
One woman went further and confronted a member of pool staff, insisting her things should never have been touched because she now had nowhere to sit.
Staff calmly explained the policy: no reservations, so everyone gets a fair shot.
“She did not agree despite getting all her stuff back,” Lucie said.
The internet has picked a side
The comments under the video, 294 of them alongside 23,000 likes, were not remotely divided.
“Well done wish all hotel done this,” wrote one user.
“All hotels should do this,” said another.
A third offered a solution to anyone upset by the policy: “If you don’t like this, all skip breakfast and stay on your loungers.”
Jay added: “Every hotel should do this! Well done.”
Someone else summed up the mood: “Not all heroes ware capes.”
Why It Matters
Sunbed wars content is now a dependable summer genre, and this clip shows why it keeps working: a teenager with a phone and a decent poolside seat pulled half a million views from thirty seconds of quiet institutional justice.
For travel and lifestyle creators, the lesson is that low-effort observational footage of petty holiday drama routinely outperforms polished content, because the audience already has a side and just wants to watch it win.
Platforms reward comeuppance, and hotels are unwittingly supplying the scripts.
The video landed days after Tom Caunce admitted sprinkling itching powder on towels left on reserved loungers in Majorca, a rather less defensible entry in the same fight.
His prank split opinion. A hotel simply enforcing its own rules is an easier hero to back.
Peak season has barely started, and every pool in the Mediterranean now has at least one guest filming at 8am.
The Rhodes pool man will not be the last.
