A hotel in Tenerife put security guards on its swimming pool.
Not for the water. For the sunbeds.
Joanna Wright was standing on her balcony at the Spring Bitacora when she spotted them.
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Uniformed staff, positioned around the pool an hour before it opened, there to stop guests claiming a lounger before the official 8am start.
“I honestly found it quite surreal seeing security guards protecting sunbeds like they were guarding a major event,” the 31-year-old from Kent told Creatorzine.
She filmed it on 22 May, during a family holiday. The footage shows exactly what you’d expect.
Guarded until eight, gone by five past
The guards held the line until the gates opened. Then they may as well have not bothered.
“As soon as the gates opened at 8am, guests rushed into the pool area to try and secure the best sunbeds,” Joanna said.
“People were moving very quickly and it felt quite chaotic, with everyone trying to claim beds immediately. They were all gone by 8:05.”
Five minutes. That was the entire window.
Joanna’s verdict on the hotel’s grand security operation is blunt.
“In my opinion, it hasn’t really stopped the sunbed wars. It has just delayed them until the gates open. Instead of people reserving beds earlier, everyone simply rushes in at the same time at 8am.”
So the hotel spent money to make the chaos punctual.
The bed they took from a child
The worst of it landed on her son.
Joanna had to walk the long way round to a ramp with the pram, so the boy went ahead to hold beds for the family. He managed it. Briefly.
“While he was holding the beds, another guest came over, put his towels down and told my son to move,” she said.
“By the time I made it over there, we ended up having to find somewhere else instead.”
A grown adult evicting a child from a lounger, in front of the staff hired to keep things fair.
Joanna called it “intense and stressful” for families. That feels generous.
Not the only battlefield
Spain has its own front in this war.
At the Golden Donaire Beach Hotel in La Pineda, Tarragona, the pool doesn’t open until 9am. The queue starts forming at 7:45.
Nicole Mason-Price, 35, watched the whole thing from her balcony with her daughter Nevada while her husband went into battle.
Shawn, 34, joined the 8am queue after what his wife described as a breakfast pep talk.
From the West Midlands, Nicole has seen how it goes.
“People push, swear and shout and claim more sunbeds than they should which causes arguments,” she said.
Why it matters
The sunbed war is reliable summer content, and creators know it.
A man queueing at dawn, a hotel resorting to hired muscle, a child losing a lounger to a stranger with a towel.
It films itself. Every clip is a small drama with a clear villain, an obvious stake and an ending everyone has lived through, which is precisely why holiday footage like Joanna’s travels so far so fast.
It also keeps working because nothing changes.
The same scenes, the same hotels, the same towels, year after year, with platforms rewarding the most outrageous version each time.
The wider pattern
Hotels across Spain and the Canaries have tried everything from removing reserved towels to fining early birds, and the behaviour adjusts rather than stops.
The Spring Bitacora’s guards are just the latest defence to be beaten by the 8am sprint.
What to watch is whether any hotel finds a deterrent that actually holds.
Until one does, expect more footage, more queues, and more dads being sent in after breakfast.
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