The Great Sunbed Scramble
During peak season, the intense pressure to snag a free sunbed by the pool has driven several tourists at luxury resorts in southern Tenerife to sleep outdoors. Recent footage from a four-star hotel shows guests sleeping on the sun loungers, despite having paid €260 per person per night for their rooms. What might seem like a funny anecdote to some actually highlights a growing problem associated with mass tourism: the fierce battle for space and comfort in saturated infrastructure.
A Growing Trend in Resort Hotspots
This scene, repeated across numerous hotels in the areas of Costa Adeje, Los Cristianos, and Playa de las Américas, reflects a booming behavior during the summer months. Tourists, particularly from the UK and Germany, head down at the crack of dawn to place towels on the sunbeds—a common practice that has now escalated to the extreme of falling asleep there to secure their place. “It’s a vicious cycle: some sleep there to mark their territory, and others feel that if they don’t do the same, they’ll lose their spot,” explained a British guest who witnessed the events.
Hotels Fight Back with New Rules
This conduct is a direct response to the fear of missing out on a space by the pool, one of the most coveted areas of the hotel during sunny hours. Faced with an increase in conflicts and complaints, some hotels have adopted corrective measures to curb this dynamic:
• Towel Removal: Unattended towels left for a prolonged time are removed by staff.
• Time Limits: Usage time limits for sunbeds are enforced, with supervision from personnel.
• Assigned Loungers: Sunbeds are assigned per room to reduce competition among guests.
However, these strategies are not always effective. The high density of occupancy and lack of space in common areas during the summer complicate their implementation. Furthermore, the most persistent tourists find ways to skirt the rules, even defying common sense by sleeping outdoors to maintain their “territory.”
Record-Breaking Tourism Numbers
Tourism continues to break nearly all records in the Canary Islands, especially concerning key macroeconomic variables. The most recent data concerns the arrival of international tourists to the islands in July and the related general tourist spending (which is not equivalent to the total economic resources left by this dominant productive sector in the Canaries). This data also allows for an analysis of the cumulative figures for 2025, with seven months now passed (January-July).
The results are staggering. Observing such abundant records is dazzling yet again, a trend that has continued for many months, since approximately mid-2022, and in a sustained manner. This past July, according to statistics released this Monday by Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE) from its Frontur and Egatur studies, the Canary Islands received 1.23 million foreign tourists. This is the highest figure in history for a month of July, thanks to a 6% relative increase compared to the same month in 2024 (which was itself a record year for total tourist arrivals to the islands and the influx of international visitors, with 15.2 million people).
