Towels at dawn: inside the battle for sunbeds, parking and poolside peace

I'm chatting to a friend's daughter about her just-completed Euro-summer - the sort of school-leavers' holiday that should feature nothing more stressful than which flavour gelato to choose.

"It was amazing," she beams. "But the sunbed hogs ..."

Ah. The sunbed hogs.

She goes on: "People would literally set their alarms for dawn, creep down to the pool, and cover every single sunbed with a towel. Then they'd disappear - back to bed or off to breakfast."

By the time she and her little girl gang sauntered down, ready for a swim? Every lounger bore a towel - yet half sat empty for hours. Chaos would erupt as guests started shifting towels and clashing with others over "ownership", she told me. Her group, to their credit, simply flopped poolside in quiet protest.

I've been there, too.

For years, I holidayed on Fiji's Castaway Island with four other families. We'd take over a neat row of beachside bures, each with its own set of deckchairs out front - at least in theory. More than once we'd emerge to find every chair and even the hammocks draped with strangers' towels, snorkels and inflatable dolphins ... but no people in sight. We'd set up around the ghostly placeholders, and sometimes the "owners" wouldn't appear until late afternoon.

Sure, it's a first-world problem - but it's also a masterclass in holiday bad manners.

Because where does it end? If it's okay to reserve a pool lounger at 6am and not sit on it until 3pm, is it okay to bag a whole row at the theatre with cardigans? To "own" a cafe table while you queue at the counter for 20 minutes? To leave a sweat towel on the gym's only squat rack while you take a work call? To stand in a parking space to save it for a friend?

(That last one - the human car-spot-holder - is surely nature's most annoying invention.)

It's undemocratic, it's irritating, and it kills the holiday vibe.

Some places are already cracking down. Harbourside councils in Sydney outlawed reserving prime New Year's Eve vantage points with tents and tarps - at one point the foreshores looked like eerie, abandoned tent cities. Wollongong City Council even had to post signs that banned people from using cling wraps to "seal" picnic shelters so they could hog them. The prime minister himself once weighed in, frowning on the practice of using cabanas to reserve stretches of sand on Sydney beaches.