Get Your Pool Deck Ready for Summer

Sunbeds are some of the highest-margin chairs at any resort. Most hotels still manage them with a clipboard, a towel race, and goodwill.

13 May 2026

Three ways resorts run sunbeds and cabanas, and what to fix before peak season, whether you sell them or include them in the room rate.

Whether your hotel sells sunbeds and cabanas or includes them in the room rate, the way you manage your pool deck has a measurable impact on revenue, reviews and staff time every summer. For resorts and beach clubs that sell, it's a direct line to ancillary revenue. For all-inclusive and luxury properties that don't, it's a major driver of guest satisfaction, complaint volume and cross-sell opportunity. Below, three approaches resorts take today, the trade-offs of each, and what's worth looking at before peak season starts.

What's at Stake Each Summer

Sunbeds and cabanas matter to two different kinds of hotel, for two different reasons.

If you sell them, they're some of the highest-margin ancillaries on resort property. Gross margins typically sit at 70–80%, and at peak summer the pool and beach contribute 8–15% of TRevPAR, often more at beach-club-led hotels. A €45 sunbed booked the night before arrival is, in revenue terms, almost pure margin.

If you include them in the room rate, pool and beach operations still drive a disproportionate share of complaints, towel disputes and senior staff time. Poolside friction is consistently a top-three review theme at resort properties, even when the beds are free. The cost there is measured in review scores, repeat bookings and team workload. There's also a missed cross-sell. Without a digital booking, there's no confirmation email, and that email is one of the highest-converting surfaces in the hotel for selling boat tours, transfers, spa and other paid experiences.

In both cases, the way most hotels manage the deck hasn't changed in decades. Pool managers work from a clipboard, concierges field complaints about saved towels, and inventory (whether sold or included) is tracked with masking tape, towels and goodwill.

Guests now book everything on their phone before they check in. Pre-arrival accounts for more than 40% of in-hotel ancillary revenue at digitally enabled properties, and reservation expectations have caught up to the pool deck too.

What to Compare Before Summer

Three approaches resorts use to run their pool decks today, the trade-offs of each, and what's worth fixing before peak season starts.

Option 1. The Clipboard and the Towel Race

The default model in most hotels. Guests show up at 6.30am to claim a spot, the pool team manages disputes through the day, and reservations live on a clipboard near the bar.

What it costs:

For every resort: poolside disputes are a top-three complaint theme in resort reviews. A single recurring issue drags a property's average score by 0.1–0.3 stars over a season, which lowers conversion through OTAs and direct.
For every resort: 60–90 minutes of senior staff time absorbed every morning by bed disputes, across pool, concierge and front desk. The same management problem whether the beds are sold or included.
For hotels that sell: premium positions (front row, shaded, beachfront) are given away first-come, first-served. Tiered correctly, those positions command 2–3x the price of standard beds, leaving €70,000–€140,000 of margin on the table across a season.
For hotels that include sunbeds: the same first-come, first-served logic means the most desirable beds go to the earliest riser, not to the suite guest or the returning VIP. Allocation is invisible to the team that's supposed to manage it.

Option 2. A Spreadsheet and a WhatsApp Number

A half-digital model: a shared spreadsheet maintained by the pool team, with bookings collected via WhatsApp, email or a form on the hotel website.

What it costs:

For every resort: by 11am on a peak day, the shared sheet is out of date on 20–30% of beds. Confidence in the system erodes within a week, including from the team running it.
For every resort: the pool deck stays disconnected from the rest of the hotel. No automatic prompt for the poolside lunch, the spa, or an afternoon experience. Hotels with connected systems see attached spend 30–50% higher per cabana than hotels managing sunbeds in isolation.
For hotels that sell: 10–15% of bookings come in pre-arrival. Better than the towel race, a fraction of what's possible. Because bookings are charged at the deck, no-show rates run at 15–25% on reserved beds.
For hotels that include sunbeds: WhatsApp requests for cabanas don't sync with anything. Group bookings, suite arrivals and recurring guests get the same treatment as walk-ins.

Option 3. Sunbeds Inside Turneo

Run the deck the way the best hotels already run every other in-hotel service: digitally, in advance, with proper inventory management, tied to the Guest Experience Profile. Inside Turneo, this is the Sunbeds view, operating alongside spa, transfers and concierge in your Experience Store.

What changes:

For every resort: the pool team works from a live deck view on their phone. The clipboard goes away. Disputes drop to near zero. The front desk gets back 1–2 hours of senior staff time every morning, and pool-related complaint volume falls 70–90% across the season.
For every resort: the pool deck connects to the rest of the hotel. A guest who books or is allocated a cabana becomes a natural candidate for the poolside lunch, the 4pm massage, the sunset experience. Attached spend per cabana averages €30–€60 higher than an isolated booking.
For hotels that sell: 60–80% of premium beds sold pre-arrival across resorts running this approach. Pool and beach revenue per peak day lifts 25–40% versus the towel-race baseline. For a typical resort, that's €60,000–€180,000 of incremental ancillary revenue per season. TRevPAR uplift of 4–8% is typical in the first season.
For hotels that include sunbeds: every bed has an owner, every cabana has a guest, and the team can see allocation in real time. VIPs, suite guests and returning visitors get the positions they expect, without the front desk having to chase the pool team.
The cross-sell, even for free sunbeds: every booking, free or paid, triggers a confirmation email that recommends boat tours, transfers, spa and other paid experiences. The free sunbed becomes the surface that sells the €120 boat trip. For hotels that don't sell the deck, this is the single highest-converting cross-sell moment in the guest journey.

Setup: mapping inventory, pricing tiers and pool zones takes a half-day with our onboarding team. After that, the system runs itself, and most properties recoup setup time within the first peak weekend.

Who Should Look at This Before Summer

Resort and beachfront hotels of all kinds.

All-inclusive and luxury properties that include sunbeds in the room rate face the same management problem, and arguably feel it more sharply: every disputed bed is a guest expectation gap rather than a transactional miss. The cost shows up as 250–400 hours of avoidable senior staff time across the season and a 0.1–0.3 star drag on review averages.

A single peak summer of doing nothing typically costs more, on either count, than investing time in a system that fixes it.