Laura Smith and her fiancé Eric Whittaker, from Coventry, West Midlands, encountered sunbed wars at the five-star RIU Funana resort in Sal, Cape Verde this month
An engaged couple were forced to queue for over an hour with hotel guests rushing to grab the best spots by pool.
Laura Smith and her fiancé Eric Whittaker have labelled their holiday morning routine “chaotic” due to the so-called ‘sunbed wars’ taking over. Laura, 30, revealed that guests armed with towels start queuing an hour before the pool opened at 9am.
Lines of more than 100 holidaymakers would stand around waiting for hotel workers to open up the pool. The couple, who got engaged last September, were staying at the five-star RIU Funana resort in Sal, Cape Verde.
The hotel, which costs upwards of £1,000 per person a week implemented a one-hour bed reserve policy to help stop the chaos. This involved pool workers placing a ticket on an unoccupied sun lounger and coming back an hour later to remove the towel if it was still unused.
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The couple, from Coventry, West Midlands, were forced to take part in the morning rush in order to grab beds for their week long trip in the sun. Laura said: “The whole morning routine became both chaotic but comical. There were four entries to the pool and I’d say there were up to 40 people in each of those queues.
“People did run for the beds however most people opted for a quick walk to the area they wanted. Queuing started from 8am as long as you were in the queue by 9am when it opened, you were normally OK to find a sunbed.
“The umbrellas are fixed so if you needed shade you’d want to be in the queue before 8:30am. The hotel would place a card on the bed and an hour later remove the towels.”
Laura, who shared footage of the encounters on her social media page, continued: “It wasn’t consistent though and beds could have been left a while before they had a ticket put on them. I think there should be enough sunbeds for how many guests are in the hotel.
“The hotel brought this in to stop the 5am bed reservers and was only put in place after I’d booked my holiday. If I had been staying for two weeks, I would have gotten really fed up with the mornings.”
The experience mirrors similar drama on the island of Majorca where Clare Wright, from Nottingham, filmed dozens of tourists race for sunbeds yet she insisted she got one every morning without trouble. The 44-year-old woman said she “had a little giggle” at the holidaymakers who she watched scramble for loungers each morning. The battle for prime spots at Protur Playa Cala Millor Hotel in Majorca, Spain, was “like something out of The Hunger Games,” she added in her TikTok.