Ahead through engineering to end bath towels at dawn

So you’ve survived a pandemic, runaway inflation, Dublin Airport and find yourself poolside somewhere in the sun. Now what?

Why not watch the Germans and Brits resume their fight over the poolside sun loungers?

After a two-year enforced pandemic break, this long-standing summer ritual — supercharged by social media — is now the subject of academic study in Germany.

Sun-bed Wars: A Holiday Nuisance and Its Impact on Holiday Satisfaction, is one such study by tourism researchers Alexis Papathanassis and Stephanie Boecker.

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Using towels to block sun loungers, they write, “frequently results in frustration, verbal conflicts and even physical violence against other holidaymakers, who were not ‘proactive’ enough to make their own ‘reservations’”.

Hotel interventions are usually “regulatory or systemic in nature” and fail to deliver results, they add, suggesting that “the behavioural drivers and perceptions need to be better understood”.

So what is really going on and why do things get so emotional?

Perhaps when Brits creep down at 7am to find Teutonic towels already blocking the sun loungers, it recalls earlier holiday humiliations.

Half a century ago, when many Brits could finally afford their first sun holiday, some were outraged to arrive in Mallorca and find the Germans had beaten them to it.

How the Germans had lost the war, yet restored their prosperity faster to afford foreign holidays first, remained a sore point. But it needn’t stay this way.

German game theory specialist Prof Philipp Weinschenk frames the sun lounger stress as a “co-ordination game of multiple equilibria”. And what does that mean?

Arriving at their holiday hotel, he says, new guests soon adapt to the behaviour of others already there. If that includes early-morning sun lounger blocking, guests will copy this behaviour and compound what he calls an “inefficient equilibrium”.

“Guests realise the cost of not getting up early to reserve a sun lounger, so they get up early, too,” he told The Irish Times.

‘Efficient equilibrium

Given most hotels have enough sun loungers for guests, assuming staggered use throughout the day, he says the goal should be to reach an “efficient equilibrium”.

Once everyone sees that it is unnecessary to reserve, no one will. The result: a happy holiday and no bath towels at dawn.

The Heidelberg-based researcher likens sun lounger blocking to stockpiling pasta or toilet paper in the pandemic. There is enough for everyone until people start hoarding and create an artificial scarcity.

Of course, using game theory to find a truce in the sun lounger war assumes people think and act rationally. Prof Weinschenk concedes that no one should underestimate the psychodrama when Germans and British holidaymakers meet.

“If someone thinks, ‘okay, here I’m the German’, then they might reserve a sun lounger, although they wouldn’t normally do so,” he said. “There may be a particular motivation here to stick it to the other.”