Last week I read this news article on the BBC News site about reserving sun loungers with towels.

A German tourist has won a payout of more than €900 (£850) after he was unable to secure a sun lounger due to other guests reserving them with towels.

Of course if you were to go down to the swimming pool you would find that there were plenty of empty sun loungers (with towels on them) not been used. People would reserve sun loungers first thing in the morning, then go back to their rooms, go to sleep, have breakfast, even pop in to town. All that time the sun lounger would sit there, unused and surrounded by people complaining that there were no free sun loungers.

Reminds me why I never used PC booking software when running my libraries. Students would reserve PCs with their “towels” and then never turn up. The PC was unused and unavailable for others to use.

The example I often used was that a student would book a PC from 10am for an hour. A student would arrive at 09:45 find that there was a “free” PC, but it was booked from 10, so wouldn’t use it, even if all they wanted to do was print an assignment, or check something online. The original student who booked the PC then didn’t turn up. We would hold the PC until 10:15, when it would then be free. This would result in lots of unused PCs which were unavailable to those who wanted to use one.

I also remember seeing students enter the library “book” a PC with their coat and bag and then head off to breakfast in the canteen! We soon stopped that.

What we did was remove the booking software (cost saving) and did not require students to book computers, they could just turn up. The end result was that we didn’t have rows of empty “booked” computers we computers been used by students and free computers for those who wanted one. There was the odd exception, so, though we didn’t require students to book a PC, if a student wanted to book a PC they could. Few did this, as we had lots of availability. It doesn’t need to be one or the other, you could of course have a fleet of bookable PCs and a set of unbookable PCs.

These days though, a lot of students would have their own devices and this would reduce the demand for bookable PCs. Reminds me of the whole discussion on BYOD, that’s a topic for another blog post.

The title of the blog mentions desks, and of course I mean hot desking and booking desks. The sun lounger issue rears its head again here. People would book desks for the day, and then spend all day in meeting rooms and at lunch. The desk wasn’t there to be used it was a place to store their bag and coat. You would enter the office, find that no desks were free on the booking system and virtually every desk was empty.

The other thing some people would do is book the same desk all the time (even if they didn’t need it) and then personalise the room with their clutter, making it unusable for anyone else.

These days with many people working in a hybrid manner, maybe it is less of an issue. However, with hybrid working, you could see the number of desks and office space being reduced in cost cutting measures, as there are now less people in the office. This then demands (by some) for desk bookings to come back.

I would apply the same mentality here that I used with PC bookings, have both bookable and unbookable desks.

Shall I talk about meeting rooms?

Going back to sun loungers there was a follow up article on BBC News which talked about how hotels are stopping the ‘dawn dash’ for sunbeds after man wins payout.

Holidaymakers have told the BBC how some hotels and resorts are cracking down on people reserving sun loungers with towels, after a man won a payout over the practice.

If every tour operator had to pay £850 to tourists who couldn’t get a sun lounger, then perhaps we might see a different approach from hotels and resorts.

What does this mean for bookable PCs and hot desks, who knows.